


Growing Pains

by Kamato



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Artistic Liberties, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming of Age, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Inspired by Music, M/M, Musical References, Post-Canon, Takes place in and around Jackson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:09:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27708134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kamato/pseuds/Kamato
Summary: So, you know the old adage, "If nobody's writing the story you want, write it yourself?" Well, there are probably a few fics out there in this vein for this work, but this is my version. JJ is coming of age without his dad, Dina having raised him on her own. Growing up in this world looks very different from growing up before the outbreak, but on top of learning how to take care of gunshot wounds and keep fed on minimal diets, JJ's learning about his mom, his friends, and just who the hell this green eyed stranger is that his mom can't stand.
Relationships: Dina & Ellie (The Last of Us), Dina & JJ (The Last of Us), Dina & Jesse (The Last Of Us), Ellie & JJ (The Last of Us), Ellie & Jesse (The Last of Us)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 49





	1. Prologue: Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for the prologue: stranger danger maybe lol. Song for the prologue: https://open.spotify.com/track/0J3sOpj4w2kqTsGjWTrJKr?si=hJkIKmCoSIaGyZI0Ma1Iig

JJ held his mom’s hand while they walked into the Tipsy Bison together. She had her rifle slung over her shoulder, which put him a little on edge. He’d handled guns by that point, mostly BB guns for practicing, but since Martha put a .22 through her own foot a couple months ago right in front of him, he didn’t like being around them a whole lot. Dina sat JJ down at a booth and smiled to him, saying, “I’m going to talk to Mr. Charles. He cobbled this thing together, he should be able to get it running again. Wait right here for me, okay JJ?”

JJ shrank his mouth to the side and chewed his lower lip. After a few seconds of watching the other visitors to the bar, he nodded. Dina’s smile widened, and she stepped back. She gave his little hand a squeeze and lifted it to her mouth for a quick peck. Disproportionate embarrassment twisted his gut a little. “Mooom!” he whined. 

With a smirk and a wink, Dina said, “Love you, kid.” 

He dropped his eyes to the table and muttered, “I love you, too, mom.”

She leaned back in dramatically, cupping her ear. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. You’re going to have to speak up, I am old.” 

“I love you, mom,” he said at a more audible volume, though obviously reluctant. 

Dina stepped back. “Thank you, cool kid.” She turned away and walked over to the far end of the bar, a grin on her face. 

JJ sat in silence for a while, watching people come and go. Most folks that came to the Tipsy Bison in the middle of the day came for food rather than booze, and there weren’t a whole lot of them there anyhow. He continued his people watching for a couple minutes, until he noticed Martha’s dad walk in. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his densely curled black hair looked unwashed. JJ chewed his lower lip. He knew that you weren’t supposed to ask when people looked like that, but Martha was his friend. 

Gathering his courage, JJ stood up from the booth and stepped over to Martha’s dad. He’d sat at the bar and was talking to a slim brunette woman. “You know where Seth is? He said he was going to give us some soup for Martha,” he said to her as JJ approached. 

The woman rolled her eyes. “Why’re you asking me? Not like Seth and I have ever been friends.” She caught JJ walking up behind Martha’s dad out of the corner of her eye and she damn near fell out of her stool. 

Martha’s dad chuckled for a moment after checking behind him and seeing JJ there. “Hey, kid. How’re you doing?”

“I’m okay.” He started to turn back to the woman, but JJ said before he’d finished turning, “Mr. Matthews? Is Martha going to be okay?” 

He sighed, giving JJ a long look. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “The doctor is coming by every couple days to check on her, and as long as we keep her rested and clean and fed, she’ll recover. So yeah, she’ll be okay, JJ.” 

That put JJ at ease a little bit. “Just, make sure you give her more than her favorite tomato soup. She’ll need protein and vitamin b12 and iron.” JJ glanced at the woman Mr. Matthews had been talking to. She seemed very very interested in the state of her fingernails, but he caught her glance up at him for an instant, and immediately back away. 

Mr. Matthews nodded to JJ. “Yep. That’s what Dr. Curry said.” He turned back to the woman then, and JJ let him. “You alright? You looked like you thought JJ was a ghost-wait. Seth! Hang on a sec!” Mr. Matthews stood up and flagged down the wrinkled, grey man who’d peeked into the main bar from a back room. He walked after him at a brisk pace, leaving JJ alone with the stranger. 

It took JJ a moment, but he remembered his manners. “Um, well, it was nice to meet you, miss.” 

He went to turn back to the booth his mom left him at, but the woman said, “Hang on.” He turned back around, confusion on his face as to why this stranger wanted to talk to him. “How old are you, JJ?” It didn’t sound like when most adults asked him his age. The question sounded a whole lot heavier than when his teachers tried to get him to open up about himself. 

“I’m ten and a half.” 

She nodded and looked away for a moment, letting the knowledge hit her properly. After a moment, she looked back up, a half smile on her face. “Ten and a half, huh? Well, I’m almost thirty. Where did you learn that stuff about vitamins?” Her tone was turning to that odd curiosity the other adults had. JJ was willing to put up with it, though. She was interesting. 

“School mostly. Mom’s been teaching me what we can grow here that’s got different vitamins and nutrients.”

“Right. So, how do you know Mr. Matthews?”

“He’s Martha’s dad.”

“Mhm. And who’s Martha to you? Friend, classmate, girlfriend?”

JJ’s face twisted in confusion to a comic point. “No, I’m ten and a half, I don’t have a girlfriend.” He opened his mouth and pointed at one of his missing molars to drive home the point. 

The woman broke out laughing, and for a second, JJ got that same feeling of having seen a ghost that she did just before him. He didn’t know why. He’d never talked to her before, but that laughed stirred up some weird, uncomfortable, old emotions. It almost came as a relief when his mother grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar and yanked him back several steps. She stepped between him and the strange woman that grew stranger by the moment. 

Dina pointed a finger at her that could have pierced her heart if she were closer. “You stay the Hell away from my son.” She turned around and grabbed JJ by the shoulder, her grip tight enough to hurt a little through his jacket. “Come on.” She marched him towards the door. Mr. Charles called after her about her gun, but JJ didn’t notice what he said. He was too focused on memorizing the woman’s features. Tired green eyes. Strong forearms. What really stood out to him, though, was the missing ends of the outer two fingers on her left hand and the cut scar through her right eyebrow.


	2. Little Pistol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ has grown up into a young man, and with his mother's care, his friends, and the walls of Jackson, he's stayed safe. That's about to change. 
> 
> Also JJ and Dina and, by extension, Jesse, all get headcanoned surnames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter include: graphic violence, strong language, traumatizing events related to the graphic violence, and brief discussion of sex. 
> 
> Chapter song link: https://open.spotify.com/track/0rPsA6WNBe8BdSgth2z0HG?si=AJ15YrmHRLmAtKWhJyB1FQ

“Oh wow, you’re getting strong.” 

JJ finished hauling the gate door shut and turned to his friend that’d helped him close it. Chris was a shorter, skinnier kid, assigned to the same watch detail as him. “Dozen eggs a day is all.” He shot his friend a smirk, rolling his shoulders. 

Rolling his eyes, Chris folded his arms and smiled back at JJ. “Yeah, yeah.” 

One of the members of the patrol they’d just let through peeled away from the rest of them, riding her horse next to them. “Hey, kids. You catch what we radioed ahead?”

JJ nodded while Chris started back up the ladder to get onto the catwalk. “Yep. You lost them though, right?”

The woman he spoke to nodded, but her posture sagged with fatigue. “Yeah. Hell of a horde, though. Pretty sure we led them away from town, but keep eyes on the treeline, and radio for help if there’s more than you all can handle.”

The adult on watch for that gate called down from the top. “We’re not stupid. And don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on those troublemakers.” The rider flashed him a thumbs up and tugged her horse back towards the stables. 

Back on the catwalk, JJ said to Chris in a low voice, “You want to go egg her house later?”

Chris smirked for a second, but caught the man on the other side of the gate watching them. “I don’t know, man. Old Lady Oliver ripped me a new asshole for wasting ammo the other week. I don’t want to think what she’d do if she caught me wasting food, too.” 

JJ rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on. We’ve got, like, a hundred and fifty pounds of powdered eggs in storage. They can spare half a dozen fresh ones.” 

With a shrug, Chris turned back towards the treeline they were supposed to be monitoring. “You do it, sure. I’m not going down with you for that.” 

“You were willing to go down for Trish. Gotta admit though, the deer blind’s probably a good spot to make out, if it weren’t past the dang wall.” JJ chuckled at his friend’s flustered expression. 

“That’s different! I had a crush on her since I was twelve!” 

JJ’s chuckle returned. “Oh, yeah, and we’ve been friends since we were eight. You know, I’m not the best at math, but I think seven years is more than three.” He looked out at the treeline again, arms folded and grinning at Chris’s flustered stammer. 

“You, I mean, you’re not, ugh, you know what I mean.” 

A few minutes passed with them scanning the treeline in silence, the silence growing more and more sullen. JJ decided to be the big man. “You know I was just fucking with you, right? If you don’t want to get in trouble, I get it.”

Chris nodded, looking away from the horizon with a sigh. “Yeah. I just don’t want you to think I don’t give a shit about you. Making out with Trish was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Egging Alice’s house with you is something I could do any day, really.”

JJ pressed his mouth into a line. He’d been out in those woods he was watching about twice. There was something liberating about not having walls around you, and something exhilarating, too. “If I went out there tomorrow,” he said, “would you come with me?” 

“Huh? Why?”

JJ shrugged. “I don’t know. If I just needed to get out there for a while, would you come with me? Even if Trish offered to suck your dick?”

Chris blinked a few times. “I don’t get what you’re asking.” 

JJ didn’t know either. “Forget it.” 

“If you want to sneak out sometime, I’ll watch your back, but-”

“I said forget it,” JJ snapped at his friend. “Let’s just finish the watch. I’ll be more talkative at school tomorrow.” 

“Sure.” 

They did as he suggested, watching the treeline for another thirty or so minutes. It was a nice view, even if the melting snow made the stretch of field beyond Jackson’s wall muddy. The sun was just reaching the horizon when Chris spotted movement in the treeline. He lifted the binoculars around his neck to his eyes and muttered a curse. 

JJ looked over to him as Chris lowered his binoculars. “What is it?” 

Chris pointed to what he saw, then pulled out his compass for a moment. “Right around 235, 240. Here.” He passed the compass to JJ so that he could use the degree direction he said when looking through his own binoculars. JJ followed the directions Chris had spoken and chewed his lower lip. It took him a minute, but he saw them. Somebody darting between trees, a long barreled firearm in their hands. 

“Hey, Jeff,” JJ called to the man on the other side of the wall. Jeff looked up from where he was reading a book in a folding chair on the catwalk. “Check degree 235. I think I see someone out there.” 

Jeff shrugged and pulled out his compass and binoculars. As he scanned, radio chatter came through on Chris’s radio. JJ didn’t quite catch it, but Chris looked disturbed. “What’s up, Chris?”

“The crew at the main West gate is taking shots, but they can’t tell from where.” He turned to Jeff. “Hey, get down! They’re hostiles!”

Jeff nodded and knelt behind the wall, drawing a semi automatic rifle from over his shoulder. JJ followed suit. He looked over to Chris, and saw his friend observing the woods with his binoculars. He hissed, “Get down!” 

Shaking his head, Chris said, “The guy out there is alone, and he’s using a carbine. I doubt he could get a headshot from three hundred yards, at least, not on the first shot at least.” For a moment, JJ was confused about why Chris was talking about headshots, but then he remembered Chris was a solid four inches shorter than him or Jeff, and so only his head peeked over the top of the wall. 

While JJ felt adrenaline building in him, trying to work himself up enough to get Chris to take cover, he heard shots from near the West gate, nearly a quarter mile away. Chris’s radio chattered again, and JJ caught a couple phrases, talking about, “well armed men,” and, “around twenty.” 

“Should we go help them?” JJ said aloud, intending Jeff to hear him as well as Chris. 

Jeff responded. “No! These assholes aren’t stupid, they know they’re not just going to be able to shoot through one of our gates. This is probably a distraction so they can try to infiltrate from another angle.” 

Some shots went off closer by, but JJ was confused by them for a second. They sounded like they were coming from inside Jackson. Then a familiar voice sounded through the radio, and JJ’s blood ran cold as he heard Dina say, “Some of them are past the wall, in the suburbs!” She went on to say that she’d commandeered one of their radios, and told the rest of them through her radio what frequency they seemed to be using. 

Chris scanned through the different channels that the people living in Jackson used to communicate. When he got to the emergency one, the radio erupted in voices, people saying they’re under attack, they’re getting hurt, one person screaming for a tourniquet. JJ’s blood ran cold. Nobody had gotten past the wall in years, not since they cleared the foliage beyond it out to at least seventy yards. Before he realized what he was doing, JJ was starting down the ladder. 

Jeff hollered at him, “Mr. Dai, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?!”

JJ was halfway down the ladder, he wasn’t going to stop then. “I’m going to make sure my mom’s alright.” He jumped down the last bit, but his boot slipped on a patch of mud, sending his elbows slamming into the mud. Chris and Jeff yelled after him, but he didn’t hear them. All he heard was the occasional gunfire from inside the walls, punctuated with distant screams. 

As JJ ran through the streets of Jackson, the shadows growing, he thought about the other kids in Jackson. Plenty of them had been orphaned, that was just a fact of life. Right then, though, he couldn’t think about the nightmares, the depression some of his orphaned friends had gotten after finding their parents shot or torn apart by infected. He squeezed the grip of his Chinese SKS rifle with white knuckles. A few months back, some folks from Jackson had found a crate full of the things just over the Canadian border, still soaked in cosmoline. They gave him one of the ones without a bayonet since he was supposed to be on the wall, but rushing between alleyways and down narrow footpaths, he wished he had one. 

JJ wove past a set of greenhouses, his youth and athleticism helping drive him towards his mom. He’d just sprinted down an alleyway when a man attacked him right at the end of it. JJ hadn’t seen him in the shadows, the man with mud painted on his face and wearing indigo clothing, but when he put his hands on him, JJ was very much aware. With a series of quick maneuvers, the man had ripped JJ’s rifle out of his hands, tossed it down the alleyway, and tripped JJ onto his back. 

JJ reached for the knife on his belt, but the adult had his own knife in his hand already, and dropped down to drive it into him. He planted a knee on the arm JJ was reaching with hard enough to leave a nasty bruise, but the adrenaline in JJ’s veins kept him from noticing. Then, the knife flashed down towards JJ’s face. Reflexively, JJ caught his wrist with his free hand. JJ was a strong kid, but the man trying to kill him had the leverage and weight advantages. The knife descended towards JJ’s neck, and the kid’s rapidly firing brain barely had the functionality to call out, “Help!” while squinching his eyes shut as if to deny what was coming.

A solid, “thunk,” sounded from above JJ, and the man attacking him toppled to the side without so much as a grunt. JJ peeked his eyes open when the weight behind his wrist shifted. The man had fallen onto his side, an arrow shaft sticking out of his skull at an angle. He looked around to see a slight woman with her hand extended. “Get off your ass and on your feet, we’re moving,” she said, and helped pull him to his feet. She shoved his rifle into his hands, and they took off in the same direction JJ had previously run in. 

It took JJ a minute to recognize her, but once out of the alleyway and in more light, he knew her. She was the local bowyer, someone he’d seen around town. He’d remembered her in particular every time he saw her, that weird day in the Tipsy Bison five years ago coming to mind. Right then, though, he was just glad to have someone obviously capable coming with him. 

As they drew near to his house, JJ heard gunfire pick up around there. The green eyed stranger stopped him with a hand on his chest midway through an alley, turning to him and saying in a deadly serious voice, “Do you know how to use that rifle?” 

“I mean, I can shoot targets-”

“Have you ever killed someone?” 

A saying his mother liked came to JJ. “Just jumping right in without any foreplay, huh?” 

She blinked a few times. “Answer the question, JJ.” 

For a moment, he was surprised she remembered his name, but the panic pushed it out of his head, and he answered her. “I’ve only ever killed infected.” 

She nodded and started back down the alley. “I think your mom is fighting them right now. When we get there, stay out of sight. Only shoot if you have no choice.” 

His blood boiled for a second at her dismissal of his potential contributions, but then they heard a female scream that sounded eerily familiar. They both double timed it, and as they approached a street corner, the woman held up a hand to JJ again, telling him to hang back as bullets screamed by. They both peeked around the corner and down the street. At least it’s easy to tell who’s who, JJ thought. The people attacking Jackson had dark clothes on and face paint, some of them with body armor. Then JJ saw his mom, and his eyes widened. She was sat behind a dumpster on the street, one of her legs stretched out before her and blood already soaking her lower right pant leg. She was putting pressure on it and packing with white gauze that quickly turned red. 

JJ turned around and vomited when the gunfire paused for a moment, long enough for him to hear the pained grunts and screams of his mother in cover and the people on both sides in the street. He shook his head and turned back around. The bowyer was nowhere to be seen, and he seethed that she’d left this to him and what few of his neighbors were still armed and capable of fighting. He peeked around the corner again just in time to see one of the assailants sprinting across the lawn towards the Matthews house. The man kicked the front door in, and immediately caught a wood axe at the junction of his left shoulder and his torso. He lifted his pistol and shot into the house as he collapsed backwards onto the stoop, and the thought that his friends might be joining his mom bleeding out on the floor stopped his heart for an instant. 

It kick started when he saw one of the attackers trying to flank around one of the citizens of Jackson, and inadvertently coming into sight of Dina. Dina was busy trying to keep the hole in her leg from killing her, but she still went for the Browning Hi-Power in the dirt next to her. JJ saw that she wasn’t quick enough, and that this man lifting his shotgun towards her was about to kill her, and he choked. JJ tried to put his sights on this man, but panic shook him and adrenaline kept him from focusing and he couldn’t line them up. 

Then an arrow sailed towards him and the man burst. The explosion that ripped him apart turned JJ’s ringing ears to mostly deaf, the gunshots suddenly sounding like they were coming from a mile away and underwater. It didn’t seem real, not even after a severed hand landed wetly next to his foot. Odd thoughts hit JJ amidst the panic and chaos. Shame that shotgun’s going to be ruined, he thought. That’s going to be Hell to clean off the front of Hannah’s house. Then he saw Hannah lying in the street, her torso and arm soaked with blood, her pistol on the ground next to her with the slide locked back, and her eyes staring sightlessly at the purple sky. 

He vomited on the street again, hardly feeling the sting in his throat and nostrils when bile poured through. Looking back on the street, most of the assailants were down. Four or so of them had arrows sticking out of them, some of them still squirming while they bled out. Another couple had large, obvious slash wounds in their torsos. One of the assailants, the last, JJ thought, ran down the street towards him, panic in his eyes. There was gore in his beard. He looks like he takes care of his beard, JJ thought. Then he saw JJ watching, and JJ put three rifle rounds through his chest. He didn’t think about it this time. 

His stomach still flipped and roiled, but he saw his mom’s strength failing, and so he stumbled over towards her, all the assailants fled or incapacitated as far as he could tell. As he made his way over to her, he heard the man he’d shot coughing out the last of his life. The bowyer knelt by Dina before he got there. He heard Dina speak amidst the ringing and the moaning, but he couldn’t make it out. He saw the bowyer lay her bloody machete in the yellow grass next to them, and he did manage to make out what she said. 

“Gunshot?” 

Dina nodded. 

“Alright. How long have you been applying pressure?” 

“I lost track around forty five seconds.” 

The bowyer nodded and gently removed Dina’s hand from the blood soaked gauze packed into her leg. Dina let out a pained gasp that punched JJ in the chest. The woman shook her head and turned to JJ. “This is still gushing. Do you know how to tie a tourniquet, JJ?” JJ shrugged. He’d been taught, but he never had to actually use one. In either case, he pulled out the cloth strip and steel rod given to him before he started his watch shift earlier. The woman took them from him and turned back to Dina, starting to wrap the cloth around her thigh. “This is going to hurt like a motherfucker, Dina.” 

“Hang on,” Dina said, and tugged one of her leather gloves off. She moved lethargically, but deliberately, folding the glove over and putting it between her teeth. “Good to go, Ellie,” she said, muffled through the glove and sweat already pouring down her forehead despite the fifty degree weather. 

JJ looked away after the first powerful twist of the rod. He covered his ears after his mom’s first, if muffled, sobbing scream. He remembered his first, and as of then, last hunting trip. The deer he’d shot through the lungs made it a little ways before collapsing, making this pitiful, whining, wheezing scream. He’d never thought the word pitiful could be used to describe his mother, but the sounds she made couldn’t be anything else. 

Ellie put a hand on JJ’s shoulder, and he looked up, slowly peeling away the palms he’d dug into his ears. Dina was still wheezing in pain, but she wasn’t screaming anymore. “JJ, I, Dina needs you to be strong. You’re stronger than me, so you need to help her get to the infirmary.” 

He felt anything but strong right then. “I, I need help. I need your help.” 

Shaking her head, Ellie said, “I need to stay here and deal with these guys.” She thumbed over her shoulder at the still squirming attackers, and spotted someone crossing the street towards them out of the corner of her eye. 

Looking over at the person she’d seen, JJ recognized her as Martha Matthews. She was a little older than him, but a bit shorter and lighter weight-wise. She had her dad’s densely curled, dark hair, but wore it longer, and had her mom’s hazel eyes. Concern was writ across her face, but she dealt with the gore all over the street much more steadily than JJ had. “Hey, Josie!” Despite the situation, JJ chafed a little at her use of his given name. “How’s your mom?” 

Dina spat her glove out of her mouth and grunted through her teeth, “Fucking peachy. Help my kid get me to the infirmary so I can quit looking at her.” She gave a weak gesture towards Ellie. Oddly enough, her words seemed to have a much more dramatic effect on the bowyer than anything else that had happened that day. 

Martha laughed ruefully. “You got it, Miss Ehrlich.” She crouched next to Dina while Ellie wrung her hands and stood back. Martha looked over to JJ. “Grab her weak side. You’re beefy, you can support her weight better.” 

They started helping Dina to the infirmary, JJ forcing his trembling knees to keep from buckling while his mom grunted and whimpered six inches next to him. Since the gunshots had started going off near his neighborhood, he’d felt like he wasn’t really in control of his body. He felt like some determined, almost supernatural force was guiding him. If he were more religious, he might have called it God, or a guardian angel. 

Without thinking, like most of what he’d done throughout that evening, he asked, “So, mom. Why do you hate Ellie so much?” 

He instantly regretted his question, but Dina didn’t respond anyhow. He worried for a moment that he’d figuratively stepped on her foot, but he quickly realized that it was just because she was in pain and weak from blood loss. 

The walk to the infirmary seemed to take hours, but really it just took until the sun had dipped below the horizon. The distant gunfire had died down, and the adrenaline in JJ’s veins had mostly faded by the time they arrived at the repurposed office building. 

Martha got the door open, and JJ’s knees almost buckled at the sounds of pain inside the infirmary. A haggard nurse in street clothes rushed over to them. “What’s going on with her?” 

“Gunshot, lower right leg. It was still gushing after more than forty five seconds of packing and pressure, so we got a tourniquet on her,” JJ said. He impressed himself with the coherence of his answer. 

The nurse nodded. “Alright. Come on, let’s get her to a bed.” He led them down a hall past the lobby, stopping in an old office that had been converted into a two bed ward, a section of thin drywall between the two hospital beds. JJ and Martha lifted her into the bed and Dina let out a weak groan that almost worried JJ as much as the screams when Ellie was tying her tourniquet. “Well, at least she’s conscious,” the nurse said, and turned to Dina. He waved a hand in front of her face, and she grumpily batted it away. “Alright, Miss Ehrlich, I would usually do a whole rigmarole to determine your condition, but we’ve got lots of hurt folks to take care of. What’s your favorite food?”

“Danny’s smoked pork sausages,” Dina managed to grunt between quick whines. 

The nurse smirked. “How kosher.” Dina gave him a weak chuckle. “Well, you’re lucid, so that’s good. I’m going to go talk to the doctors, try and get you in surgery as quickly as possible. Depending on what’s going on out there, that could be twenty minutes or two hours.” The nurse turned to JJ and Martha. “You two, if she loses consciousness, becomes unresponsive, starts to exhibit signs of a stroke like slurred speech or partial paralysis, or blood starts gushing from her wound again, hit that button.” He pointed at a red button installed into the wall by the hospital bed. “Someone will come running.” Then, he turned and left. 

JJ took the chair next to his mom’s bed and she gave him a weak squeeze of the hand and a stronger smile. “I’m proud of you, kid. You did good back there.” 

JJ forced a smile in an effort to make her feel better. When she pulled her hand back after a moment, though, he noticed his own was shaking pretty hard. He stuffed his hand into his pocket so that he wouldn’t have to think about that. 

They sat in near silence for a couple minutes, Dina alternating between shaky breathing and almost convulsively powerful groans. Martha spoke up and JJ remembered she was there. “Hey, JJ, come here.” 

JJ looked to her where she leaned by the door, quietly appalled at the casualness of her tone. He stood up and stepped over to her on shaky legs. Martha pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and grabbed JJ by the back of his neck. His heart stopped for a moment, all the terrifyingly powerful emotions running through him turning the simple gesture into something that it wasn’t. He managed to keep from shoving her away, and she wiped something off his face. After she’d finished, he pulled back, almost too afraid to ask her what was on his face. 

She seemed to read his mind, an indecipherable half smile on her face. “It was mostly just tears on your face, Josie, don’t worry.”

Despite the situation, a pang of embarrassment still hit him. “Oh.” He returned to his seat by his mother. Her sweat drenched face turned towards him slightly, and he caught a wink and a smirk from his mom. JJ chuckled lightly. Even half bled to death, she was still doing the embarrassing mom thing. I’m going to miss that, he thought, and almost passed out from the impact of finally consciously thinking that his mom was going to die. 

JJ dry heaved to the side of the chair, but he’d already wrung everything out of his gut. Outside the room, muffled wails and groans percolated through the wall. His vision seemed to blur, and he started hyperventilating, his head going light and his chest tight. He thought he was going to join Dina in the grave for a moment, before hands grabbed his shoulders and arm. Dina’s hand on his arm moved fingers in little circles, slowly bringing him out of the panic while Martha’s strong hands on his shoulders helped to ground him further. 

Then the door to the hospital room opened, followed by a crew of medical personnel. JJ had a vague thought about them being a smaller crew than on the medical dramas he sometimes caught on movie night, but they seemed very capable as they lifted Dina onto a more mobile bed and got her wheeling out of the room. In the back of his mind, JJ wanted to help. He felt paralyzed, though, and the voices of the medics sounded distant and impersonal. 

After the medics left with his mother, JJ was about ready to collapse. He sagged forward, his elbows on his knees, and Martha took a step back. “Hey, it’s going to be okay,” Martha said, her voice finally piercing the murk. “Folks are lined up around the block to donate blood according to the nurse, and she was conscious and lucid. It’s going to be okay.” 

JJ squinted his eyes shut, trying to make sense of the turmoil in his mind. One moment from the evening stuck out in his mind: that man who tackled him in the alley. If it weren’t for Ellie, then he’d be dead, and his mom would be too. He said to Martha, conviction in his eyes and in his voice, “I need to be able to protect her. I couldn’t do that today, and she almost died because of it.” He nodded to himself, confirming his plan. “I’m going to talk to Ellie once mom has recovered some more. I need to be able to do what she does.” 

Finally, discomfort showed on Martha’s face. “Josie, I’ve gone on patrol more than you, I’ve seen and heard of what, what she can do. What she does. She’s scary, dude.” She glanced over her shoulder, though only the open door was behind her. “She’s probably torturing the survivors of that fight right now.” 

In the moment, JJ couldn’t see that as anything but justified. “If those guys are going to be coming back, if I’m going to keep my mom safe, then I need to be scary, too.”

“Your mom can handle herself, JJ.” The worry on Martha’s face and in her voice hardened JJ’s resolve. “She took out four of those guys on the street before one of them managed to clip her.” Her voice quietened for a moment. “And I don’t think she’d want you to, to turn into someone you’re not.” 

For a moment, JJ hesitated. He valued Martha’s opinion of him, and his mother’s. Then, the sound of his mom’s screams and whines resurfaced in his head, and he hung and shook his head. “I’m going to keep her safe.” He looked up to Martha. “I’m going to do whatever I have to to do that. My dad’s gone. She needs help. I’m going to be there for her, and you can’t stop me.”


	3. Do It For (Him)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ talks to his mom about coping and fear, and he follows through on his promise to Martha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter include: foul language, depiction and discussion of trauma, and absent parents. FYI, the idea for this chapter inspired the whole fic lol. Song for this chapter: https://open.spotify.com/track/54bTrcQ1rMQn9qvP3UgyIF?si=PO8i9G9zTp2NaksdfhqB0w

Home felt weird. Even after three weeks since the fight, JJ found himself waking up in the night, expecting to hear gunshots or screams or infected, or anything other than the normalcy that greeted him. Chris helped him out when he had trouble focusing at school, Mr. Matthews, too. Martha had handled the fighting and helping his mom to the infirmary oddly well, but she’d been distant since that day. 

Dina snapped JJ out of his out head, snapping in front of his face at the dinner table. “Kid. Kid. You in there?” 

He looked up, the macaroni and cheese on the plate apparently hypnotic. “Oh. Yeah, I’m here.” 

Dina gave him a smile, but he knew her and her expressions well enough to know that there was no small amount of concern behind it. “It’s movie night tonight. They’re showing Prince of Egypt. You like that one, right?” 

JJ shrugged. “I mean, when I was a kid, yeah. Music’s good.” He put a bite of macaroni in his mouth, less because he was hungry and more to avoid having to say anything else. 

With a quick exhale and a bit more sincerity behind her smile, Dina said, “Well, I’m pretty sure there’s a copy of Schindler’s List in the DVD box if you want a ‘real adult’ movie.” She emphasized the words with finger quotes. At JJ’s lack of response, both in expression and verbiage, she shrugged. “That’s fine. It’s pretty scary, I’m sure you don’t want to deal with that.”

JJ rolled his eyes at her obvious attempt at reverse psychology, allowing the corner of his mouth to twitch upwards. He swallowed, finding it difficult without the hunger to prompt it. “I’m okay with going to Prince of Egypt if you really want to, mom.” The complication that had been nagging at him came out of his mouth at his mom’s smile. “Dr. Curry said that you need to rest, though. And you’re still on crutches. We, er, you don’t want your wound to reopen.” He winced, looking back down at his noodles as he remembered seeing the ragged hole in her leg in the infirmary while they waited for the doctor. 

Dina’s smile faded, and she let out a long breath through her nose. “You can go without me, JJ.” Her smirk returned a moment later. “I’m sure you want to see that Martha girl. I see the way she looks at you, don’t think I don’t.” 

JJ scoffed. Was she really trying to get him to leave her all alone? For any reason? And besides, “I don’t think she even likes me anymore. I think she’s been avoiding me.” 

“Then go to the movie. If she’s there, you can corner her in the theater, it’s not like she hasn’t seen the movie before.”

A painful thought occurred to JJ, and he looked up at his mom with brows knit in concern. He often wasn’t very willing to talk to her about hard things, but since he couldn’t leave her to go see his friends, he might as well try her. “Do you, do you not want me around?” 

His mom looked hurt for a moment before she suppressed the emotion so as to avoid upsetting JJ. “No, kid, I’m just worried about you. You’re going to have to rejoin the world eventually, you can’t stay home and hide forever.” She said this without judgement, and with genuine concern in her voice. 

There was a grain of truth to that in JJ, and he couldn’t confront that, so he focused on his other motivation. “I’m worried about you, too, mom. Every time I leave you, every time I go to sleep, I’m scared.” A quiver took up in his voice. “I think I’m scared that when I see you next, you’ll be, be hurt again. Or that you’ll be gone.” A moment later, he added under his breath, “And I’ll be alone.” 

For a moment, Dina considered getting up to go hug her kid on the verge of tears. She decided that would worry him about her physical wellbeing too much, so she beckoned him, saying, “Come here, JJ. Give your mom a hug.” She reached over and dragged one of the other dining chairs closer to her as JJ shuffled over to her. He sat down next to her and leaned his head on her shoulder, wrapping muscled arms around her ribs. Dina stroked his black hair, dead straight like his father’s. “You are so like him,” she said. JJ drew in a shaky, wet breath. “He cared so much about me, about everyone around him. And he was protective, just like you.” Talking about him still hurt, of course, but for Dina, it was only a low, dull ache anymore. “Sometimes you even look like him.”

The house was an open floor plan, so it was easy for JJ to look over to the mantle in the living room, where his dad’s old lever action rifle sat next to a framed photo of him. He could see the resemblance. He had the same strong jaw, wide lips. His nose and brow leaned towards his mom’s features though. To JJ, it just meant that he had a lot of strong features, for better or worse, and that it was easy to pick him out of a crowd. 

“I don’t want to lose you,” JJ found himself saying through tears. 

Dina’s back stiffened, but she gave no other outward indication of reaction to his words. With his youth, and the tears, it sounded so much like when somebody else said those words fifteen years ago. “You won’t. You won’t.” Dina wished she knew the words were literally true, but she knew saying the words would help calm him down as much as they helped her to say them. 

He sniffled back a sob and sat up straight, some of the anxiety dissipated. “I’m going to go finish my food.” He gave his mom a thankful smile and stood to go do so. As they finished their meal, making lighter conversation from there on, JJ felt a little lighter, but there was a weight still, peering over his shoulder. His father’s picture, and his rifle, always loaded, their presence ever-felt. The expectations for him right there with them. 

**********

JJ took his pistol with him. Stepping out of his house was terrifying, but less than it had been a week ago. While he walked over to the bowyer’s shop, he passed the spot on the street where he found Hannah, glassy eyed and soaked with blood. He turned his eyes away from the spot. He’d already passed it some fifteen, twenty times on his way to school, he couldn’t let himself get ‘lost in the sauce’ like Chris liked to say. 

Ellie lived on the side of town closest to the deer blind. Her being a bowyer, that was more practical than anything else; if people were going to go hunting with a bow, having the bowyer near the hunting spot made sense. JJ had considered visiting her before the fight. That day in the Tipsy Bison had sparked a curiosity that waxed and waned, but never disappeared. Why had her laugh sent shivers down his spine? Why did his mom want nothing to do with her? And now, the fight. He knew that people outside of Jackson lived hard lives, that sometimes people got so desperate or hateful that they’d kill each other. Still, he couldn’t imagine how she’d learned to kill like she had. 

JJ stopped in the street a hundred feet from Ellie’s house. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do this. He’d killed a man. It wasn’t what he was focusing on at the time, but the way he’d hacked and wheezed the blood out of his lungs played in his ears when he slept sometimes. Then the memory of the sounds his mom had made returned to him, and he put on a resolute face. 

He knocked on the door hard enough for his knuckles to hurt. He waited a couple minutes, wanting to be polite in case he’d woken her up, and then knocked again, using the bottom of his fist to send a deeper, more projecting sound. Then he heard the garage door slide open, followed by Ellie calling out, “I’m over here.” 

JJ stepped over, butterflies tangling in his stomach. He saw her where she’d sat back down at a workbench in the garage of her house, fiddling with an odd looking little device. He lifted a hand, managing to get out through the nerves, “Hey, Ellie.”

She looked up from her work and blinked a few times, inhaling sharply. She set down the small, cylindrical device and sat up straight, rubbing the stumps on her left hand for a moment. “What’s up, kid? Need a bow, are you going hunting?” Standing up, she stepped over to a display rack, where a few unstrung bows of varying size and design sat. “You’re a pretty big guy, I’m sure I can find you something that’ll work for you.”

JJ didn’t know what he’d expected. Some revelatory moment? Her to just spill her guts to him? “Well, I’m not here for a bow. I guess I’m here to learn how to use them.”

Ellie stopped where she’d pulled down an English style longbow. It was almost unbent in its unstrung state. She turned around, a decidedly neutral expression on her face. “I thought they covered that in school these days.”

“They do.” JJ chewed his lower lip. “It’s like I said, though. I can shoot a target just fine.” 

Ellie’s mouth opened for a moment before closing. “You want to know how to do what I did.” At JJ’s nod, she shook her head. “I don’t know if I can do that, kid. I’m kind of shitty at teaching people things.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “And aside from that, I’m pretty sure your mom would cut my tongue out of my head for even talking to you, at least once she’s really mobile again.”

JJ squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “I’m actually here for her. If you hadn’t been there, maybe people would have gotten there fast enough to save her, but I’m pretty sure she would have bled to death. You’re not always going to be there, though.” He looked down for a moment, nodding before adding, “If my dad were there, then he would have helped, but he’s not here, so it has to be me.”

Ellie gave him a long, hard look. Then, she put the longbow back up, grabbing a short composite bow with a dramatic bend instead, along with a handful of wooden target arrows. “Come on. It’ll be easier to show me what you know with a bow that isn’t too heavy.” She started for the backyard, opening a door in the garage to get there. 

Joining her, JJ saw a few different targets built from straw. Two of them were humanoid, one large and tall, one short and skinny. The third was a pretty standard bull’s eye on a circular target. Ellie bent the bow and looped the string around the notches on either end before handing JJ the bow and the arrows. “Alright, JJ. Stand over there and take some shots at the circle.”

JJ nodded and stepped to where she pointed: a patch of tall grass about waist high, much taller than the rest of the yard, on the opposite side of the fenced in area from the circular target. For a moment, JJ hesitated. “What if I miss and it goes over the fence?”

Ellie shrugged. “Charlie knows I practice back here. I helped him put some plywood over the windows that might get damaged.” She paused. “Try not to miss though.” 

JJ nodded. He swung his arms back and forth, a quick and easy stretch. He took five slow shots, each hitting the bull’s eye six inches across. After he did it, he flashed Ellie a smile that disappeared after he saw the scrutinizing expression on her face. “What? I thought I did pretty well.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “Only thing is, if that were an enemy, it could have charged you and put a spear in your gut or ripped your throat out before you got the first shot off.” Ellie stepped over to the target and pulled the arrows out before returning to JJ. “Go again. Only this time, think about your mom, bleeding out. Think about how, if you don’t kill that target as quick as you can, she will die. And go again.”

For a moment, JJ was shocked. Then, the freshness and rawness of the memory got his heart hammering, adrenaline pumping. Ellie handed him the arrows, and he shot as quick as he could. Ten seconds or so later, his shoulder ached a little, the arrows were in the target, and he was breathing harder than the exertion demanded of his body. Two of the arrows were in the inner ring, one in the middle ring, and the other two in the unmarked outer ring. 

JJ tried to see the value in that method of training, but right then all he could feel was his chest tightening and his gut knotting thinking about his mom being hurt. He turned on Ellie, a deep scowl on his face. “What the fuck? She was shot just a few weeks ago, why would you, why would you do that?”

Ellie kept her mouth shut for a moment, her face harshly impassive, arms folded across her chest. “When I was your age, a little younger, and I was first learning this stuff, I didn’t have the luxury of practice. I had to learn pretty quick how to mitigate the anxiety I felt during fights. Adrenaline can and will save your life, but too much will make your hands shaky and keep you from thinking straight. At a certain level, though, it can give you a laser focus.” She took a deep breath in and out, keeping it smooth before continuing.

“When you’re out there, fighting for your life every day, you learn and adapt or you die. Being adaptable kept me alive until I was able to practice, and when I did practice, I did it constantly worrying about keeping myself and my loved ones safe.” Another deep breath, this one a little less even. “Practicing like that meant that, when my best friend got hurt and I had to protect him, I was able to focus.” Ellie stepped over to JJ, gently taking the bow from his hands before going to collect the arrows. 

After doing so, she turned back to him, relaxing a little when she saw his scowl lessened. “There’s a saying, that there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who has nothing to lose, but I disagree.” She stepped over next to JJ and nocked an arrow. “If you have everything to lose, you will fight harder and longer than makes any sense. Even if you have nothing but the way you feel, your strategy, and a knife, you can do the impossible.” Over the next few seconds, she burst into motion, putting five arrows into the target within two inches of each other. 

JJ blinked a few times. Even after he saw the carnage she’d left behind during the fight, he found it almost hard to believe the speed and accuracy with which she shot the bow. “So, you’re really good at this, but I don’t get it. You lived out past the walls for, what, years? Your whole life? How am I supposed to learn what that kind of experience can give from in here?”

“You can’t without going out there, but practice is what lets you survive to get experience instead of being killed the first time you run into a clicker when your gun is empty.” She shook her head, rubbing the stumps on her hand. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying. Going around in circles trying to sound profound or some shit.” Ellie pulled a fixed blade knife from a sheath on her belt and stepped over to the shorter straw man. “Okay, okay, okay. So, let’s make this basic. You focus on your strengths in order to beat your opponents, and exploit their weaknesses.” 

Ellie beckoned JJ over. JJ stepped over, saying, “How do I know their weaknesses?”

“You won’t always, and so that’s when you have to focus on your strengths.” She looked him up and down again. “You’re physically strong, but not much stronger than an average adult man. You’re not small enough for your enemies to underestimate you, though. You can shoot accurately, but not under duress.” She hesitated a moment, her mouth open, hand half raised. “You know about botany and nutrition, right? You were talking about what to eat to heal well.”

JJ shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, I pay attention in science class.”

Ellie put her tongue in her cheek. “Alright. So, how well do you know your anatomy?”

“Not as much as a nurse, but enough to be useful if someone gets hurt.”

She passed him her knife, handle first, and pointed at the straw dummy. “Stab this thing where you’ll kill it if it were a human.”

JJ looked at the knife a moment. It was about three inches long. If it were longer, he could probably get it into the aorta through the gut or the chest, but he’d have to go through a lot of muscle and viscera for that. It was long enough to get the femoral artery in the thigh, but he remembered what Ellie had said about practicality. People moved their legs a lot. He settled on the neck. If he got the jump on somebody, people don’t move their necks and heads as dramatically as their legs, and the carotid artery and jugular vein are right there. He put the tip of the knife on the side of the dummy’s neck, to the right of where the windpipe would be. With a quiet grunt and a stiff motion, he pushed it in, and yanked it out to the right. 

Turned to Ellie, he said, “I’m pretty sure that should get the carotid artery, and both jugular veins on that side.”

Ellie knit her brow, and for a moment, JJ thought she was upset with what he’d chosen for some reason. Then she said, “Hang on, both jugular veins?”

“Yeah, the internal and the external. External you can save someone if they get it cut or torn, but the internal is just about a death sentence, especially if the carotid is hit, too.”

For the first time since JJ met her in the Tipsy Bison, Ellie cracked a smile. “Okay! Alright, how’s your chemistry and physical sciences?”

“They’re fun to study. Why do you ask?”

Ellie took her knife back and started back to the garage. “Come on. I’ve got something to show you.” JJ followed her. There was something odd in her demeanor to him, similar to his mom’s when he told her about his first hunting trip. The pep in her step was obvious to him, but something dark kept her from leaning into the smile. 

Back in the garage, Ellie sat back at the workbench, JJ standing over her. She lifted up the little metal cylinder she’d been working on when JJ first walked up, saying, “So, JJ. Do you know why we in Jackson use bows instead of guns whenever we can?”

He shrugged. “It’s quieter?”

“Well yeah, but mostly because the materials to make arrows are a whole lot easier to come by than the materials to make bullets.” Looking closer, JJ saw that the cylinder was about an inch long, with a small hole on either end of differing sizes. “This, though, this is not as easy to make as a bullet, and much more devastating. This will be, eventually, an explosive arrowhead.” Ellie picked up a smaller metal puck, maybe a centimeter across. “I plug one end with this pistol primer, making sure it is protruding just a little.” She put it in one of the ends. “Then, you fill it with an explosive, maybe some shrapnel if you feel like it, but it’s small enough that the canister will be more useful.”

JJ pulled up a stool, and they got into the details of the thing. Ellie told him that she preferred to use the black powder Mr. Charles made most of the time, but that could be hard to come by, especially out in the world, and so sometimes she would have to homebrew her own explosives. At that, she set down the empty canister and opened one of the drawers in her workbench. She pulled out a black book, white text on the cover labeling it, “The Anarchist Cookbook.”

“There was a guy that used to live here when I was a kid, Eugene,” she said, pushing the book over to JJ. He flipped it open and skimmed it as she continued. “He died when I was about 18, I think. We were sort of friends. More of a friend’s friend. Anyway, um, I was on patrol one day, and we, my patrol partner and I, we found one of his hideouts. Apparently he’d been growing pot in a basement, and he had this book down there as well.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw some discomfort in her furrowed brow and nostalgic smile. “That doesn’t just tell you how to grow pot, though. There’s diagrams and instructions on making your own improvised explosives, smuggling things, other drugs.” 

“It looks useful,” JJ said. “Looks like these are a lot more dangerous than the chemistry experiments in class, though.” 

Ellie chuckled, looking up and away with a smirk. “Yeah, when Maria found that book, she was so damned pissed that I’d kept it. Then she found out how useful the explosive parts were, and got one of the more bookish folks to transcribe it a few times. Didn’t actually manage to get it back until a couple years back.” 

With a nod, JJ set it back on the workbench. “There’s a lot of useful looking stuff in there. Do you think I could learn to make some of it with you?” It might not have been the overnight mastery of combat he was hoping for, but paradoxically, he thought he’d feel a lot safer if he had a couple homemade grenades in his bag next time he went on watch duty.

“Sure.” Ellie finally turned her smile on him. “And keep the book. It’s yours.”

JJ blinked a few times, taken aback. She was practically a stranger, as much as anyone could be after they’d saved his and his mom’s lives. “Why? What about Eugene?”

She shrugged. “Consider it an early birthday present. Sweet sixteen, right?”

JJ knit his eyebrows a moment. Ellie had always been odd to him, even when he’d only ever had the one conversation with her, and here she was, knowing that it was just a few weeks before his sixteenth birthday. He decided to drop it, telling himself that she just remembered how old he was when he first met her. “So, do you live here alone? Do I need to worry about some kid or boyfriend coming home?”

Ellie half chuckled, followed by a mostly amused groan. “No, no, no kids, no boyfriend for damned sure.” She lifted up her left hand, the two stumps of her outer two left fingers apparent. “Let’s just say I lost these two and not the first two because they weren’t as important.” She shot him a smirk and a wink. JJ just wore a bemused expression for a moment as Ellie’s smirk faded. “Oh my God, it’s a sex joke. Fingering. I’m a lesbian. What the Hell are they teaching you kids?”

“Aren’t jokes supposed to be funny?” Finally, a smile crept onto JJ’s face, and even though it came at her expense, Ellie giggled with him. 

“Holy shit, I guess I do need to brush up on my puns, don’t I?” She stood up, starting for the door in the garage wall that led to her house. “Come in here. I’ve got another book to show you.” She let out a rueful chuckle as she turned the doorknob. “Listen to me. I am getting old, aren’t I?” Inside, Ellie’s house was pretty well covered with clutter. Books (mostly sci-fi), wood carving projects, all sorts of different knick knacks from a toy robot to an astronaut’s helmet, on all the shelves and tables. Only the kitchen was free from the clutter, it instead covered with various cooking and butchery implements. “Excuse the mess, I wasn’t expecting company.” 

Ellie stepped into a hallway that led away from the living room and dining room, saying, “Make yourself at home. I’m gonna go fetch the book.” As she stepped down the hall, JJ took a seat in an armchair, some of the stuffing coming out of the arm. Absentmindedly, he picked up a spiral bound notebook on the coffee table beside it, flipping it open to a random page. His eyes widened. There, staring back at him, was the most disgustingly realistic rendition of one of the infected that he’d ever seen. A bloater, missing an arm, chunks of flesh torn off it where fungal plates had come off. 

“Hey, JJ.” JJ looked up from the drawing, hearing Ellie approach out of the hallway. “Sorry that took me so long. A book fell and hit my head.” She shook her head as she stepped into view, sighing hard and dramatically. “I only have my shelf to blame.” 

JJ stared blankly for a moment. “Sorry. You look alright?”

A disappointed look crossed Ellie’s face. “Come on, man, I actually delivered it right that time. It’s a pun!” 

JJ shrugged. “I’ve never been very good at word play.”

“Dude, that’s the most obvious pun in this fucking book.” She pulled a little paperback book from where she’d hidden in behind her back. “I swear, I’m not going to be able to train a kid who can’t even tell a pun from a pickup line. How are you ever going to pick somebody up if you don’t have a clever line or a good pun to break the ice?”

“Just ask them out?” 

Ellie rolled her eyes and sat down on the couch next to the armchair JJ had taken. She adjusted a stack of books on it so that it wouldn’t topple when she shifted and said, “Yeah, right, like any teenager has ever just asked another one out. Okay, who do you have a crush on?”

JJ felt his cheeks heat up. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business?”

“Okay, then I’ll give you generic advice.” Without rancor, she took the notebook from JJ’s hands. “So, the way I’ve done it since I was a kid, the best way I’ve found to ask a girl out is to use art, at least if it’s something heartfelt. If you’re just trying to get in someone’s pants, the approach is different. Music, poetry, visual art, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s heartfelt.” She looked up from flipping through the notebook. “It doesn’t even matter if it’s good sometimes.” She turned the notebook around and passed it to JJ, saying, “This was for a guy I wanted to repair a friendship with, not a romantic partner, but the principle is the same. A flattering portrait, a landscape that makes you think of them. Stuff like that.” 

JJ looked at the penciled picture, finding a man with light hair, a greying beard, and deep frown lines. He didn’t recognize him. “I suck at art.” He passed the book back.

Ellie shrugged. “Like I said, if they like you, it doesn’t matter if the art’s good or not.”

What would Martha like, he wondered, twiddling his thumbs. “Maybe flowers? I don’t have to make something pretty that way. I just need to put pretty things together and give them to her.” Ellie smiled at him, but he shook his head with a sigh. “No way I could do that though. Every time I thought of something to flirt with her I couldn’t do or say it.”

“Well, even if you don’t want to tell me her name, tell me about her. Maybe I can help you brainstorm.”

JJ shrugged, looking up and away while thinking of Martha. “Well, she’s confident and competent. She’s passionate, and she’s caring.” He absentmindedly touched his cheek where she’d wiped it off while they were waiting for his mom’s surgery. “And she’s gorgeous. She’s got these freckles on the back of her hands.”

When he looked back at Ellie, he realized he’d had a giddy smile on his face, and that Ellie had a weird, different smile on hers. Was that pride? What did she have to be proud of? “Well, JJ, it’s scary to confess and stuff. You’ve got to be brave. Like you were for your mom.”

JJ scoffed. “That’s your advice? Just be brave? Like it’s that simple?”

Ellie shrugged. “Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. Pulling a trigger’s simple.” 

He caught that smile on her face again, that proud smile. He winced and stood up. “I’m going to get out of here. I should tell my friend what’s up so that he can confirm my alibi.”

JJ turned towards the door, so he didn’t see Ellie’s smile fall off her face. “Alright, kid. Have a good one. And you’re welcome to come back and train anytime. If I don’t answer the door, I’m probably hunting.”

JJ nodded to her over his shoulder, wearing a subtle smile despite himself. “Alright, Ellie. I’ll be back sometime.” Then, he pushed open the front door and got moving.


	4. Wake Me Up When September Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ has an odd 16th birthday celebration: going on patrol for the first time. Ellie guest stars in A Christmas Carol.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter: Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green bay. Link: https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZffCQKLFLUvYM59XKLbVm?si=rWHAqBwbRsqau82WiUqaeg
> 
> Warnings for this chapter include: foul language, graphic violence, substance use and abuse, trauma, nightmares, sexual assault mention, parental worry. Let me know if I missed anything anyone would like included in the warnings, please.

“You know, if Miss Oliver would let me, I’d be out there with you.” 

JJ was in the armory, Dina there with him. She still used the crutches at his insistence, despite it being more or less a sure thing that her wound would be healed soon enough. He kept reloading the AK magazine on the table, saying, “I know. I’d rather you were out there, too, mom.” He inserted the magazine into the modified SKS rifle on the table. There were other people in there, gearing up with the quartermaster’s approval for the group patrol. 

Dina turned and sat on the table JJ was working on, giving his shoulder an affectionate squeeze. “You know you don’t have to do this more than just this once. Especially not with those bandit fucks still out there.”

With a shrug, JJ started working on adjusting the sling for the rifle. Tight enough to keep it out of the way, loose enough to draw quickly. “I know, mom. I’ll be careful.”

“And if you start taking shots-”

“Take cover first, worry about the wounded later.” JJ winced, keeping his eyes on the task at hand, not wanting to see the fear or pride or whatever emotion would be on his mother’s face. “And I’ll make sure to let the experienced people do the work if things go wrong. I have nothing to prove to anyone,” he recited his mother’s words nearly perfectly.

“Good.” She gave his shoulder a little jostle. “I’m going to go talk to Miss Oliver. First things first though, what’s the protocol for clearing a jam?”

“Rack the slide. If that doesn’t work, change magazines and do it again, and if that doesn’t work, switch weapons until things calm down and you can be more certain.” 

Dina gave him a last pat on the shoulder and said, “Love you, kid.”

“Love you, too, mom.” He didn’t look up until she’d stepped away to talk to Miss Oliver outside of the armory. If he knew either woman, the recently elected leader of Jackson would fear nothing more than his mother when she was concerned for her son’s well being. 

Somebody gave his shoulder a playful shove from behind, and he turned around to see Martha standing there, a cocky grin on her face, freckled hands folded over a flannel shirt. “Mommy’s going to tell big bad old lady Oliver to take care of her baby boy, isn’t she?” JJ rolled his eyes and smirked at her teasing, shaking his head. “Tell her not to worry. I’ll keep you safe.”

JJ’s face flushed and he glanced around the armory at the other people going on patrol. Most of them were ignoring them or negotiating with the quartermaster, but a middle aged man was smirking next to a slightly younger woman while she giggled, them both looking at JJ and Martha. “You’ll keep me safe, huh? And who between us has shot themselves in the foot?” JJ asked Martha, a little more bite in his tone than he intended. 

Martha’s grin soured a little. “Hey, I was twelve! And dumb. And just fucking around, Josie, sheesh.”

Turning back to the table, JJ put his 1911 on the table and unloaded it, making sure his magazines were as full as the stiff springs would allow. “Don’t call me that,” he said, trying to make his tone lighter. 

It seemed to work, and the return of Martha’s smile to her face brightened JJ’s nervous spirits. “I’ll stop calling you Josie when it stops irritating you. No, I’ll stop calling you Josie when you start preferring it, just so that I can keep irritating you.” 

“Alright, fine.” JJ returned to work for a few seconds before a devious thought occurred to him, a smile spreading across his lips as it did. “If you’re going to keep calling me Josie, then I guess I’m going to have to start calling you Marty.” 

“I’m cool with that.” Martha shrugged, her face completely unbothered. “Marty. Kinda like it.”

Letting out a playful groan, JJ said, “Come on, that’s an old man’s name! The worst kind of man’s name.”

She smirked. “Well, JJ, I am not beholden to the same archaic ideas of gender as you are, apparently. Some good turnaround though. Never knew you were that good with words.”

JJ chuffed a laugh. “I’m really not. Just been hanging out with someone who is.” He’d visited Ellie several times again in the past few weeks. 

Martha’s smirk slipped slightly, but she righted it. “Well, be careful with her, Josie. She’s more dangerous than anything we’re going to see out there today.” 

His brow furrowed, and JJ said, “I think I’m good to go. Talk to me outside?” He looked around the room at the peeping eyes and ears, more than a little uncomfortable talking about this subject with them around. 

“Sure. Let me just get finished loading up, I’ll meet you outside.” Martha stepped over to the quartermaster to wait for him to finish with one of the other people on the patrol. 

Out in the street, JJ fiddled with a folding knife, opening it with one hand, then the other. If he was attacked and only had one free to fight with, he’d need to be able to open it quickly with one hand. That’s what Ellie said, anyway. He picked some gunk from under his fingernails with it, thinking about what Martha had said about her. She said she tortured people, she was scary. She hinted that she might turn him into something he wasn’t. Thinking about that warning, he hoped she was right. He’d been unable to stop that man with the shotgun when he was about to kill his mother because, in his mind, he was a pure coward. He needed to be otherwise.  
Still, he needed to talk to Martha about Ellie. They’d been distant in the month and a half or so since the bandits got into Jackson and shot people in the street. The past couple weeks, she’d been warming up to him again, but she still hadn’t told him how she knew these things about Ellie. He knew Martha regularly went on patrol, she knew what to do in a fight. If someone as capable and dangerous as she was uncomfortable with Ellie’s actions, it was worth knowing. 

“Lost in thought there, kiddo?” JJ looked up from his fingernails to see Ellie stepping out of the shadow of an alley. 

“Little bit. What are you doing here?” Getting a better look at her, he saw a quiver full of arrows on her hip next to a holstered revolver, a short recurve bow over her shoulder, the bowstring biting into the shoulder of her fleece lined corduroy jacket. 

“I convinced old lady Oliver to let me on this patrol.”

Stepping in from just out of JJ’s field of view, Miss Oliver said, “You know I don’t appreciate being called old lady.” Ellie smirked at her unabashedly. To be fair, JJ thought, she did have grey hair and crow’s feet, even if she stood tall and straight. “If we didn’t have so many youngsters on this one, I’d have been more reluctant.”

Ellie shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll be able to keep up. I’ve been keeping fit even if I haven’t been going on patrol.” 

Glancing at JJ, Miss Oliver stepped closer to Ellie and lowered her voice. By virtue of being young and not around constant gunfire as much as the two women, he still picked up what they said. “You’re sure you’re going to be okay with this? If shit hits the fan and guns start going off all at once, you’re not going to have another freak out?”

Ellie’s smirk vanished. “Yeah, I can do it. I’m not done yet.”

Miss Oliver clapped her on the shoulder. “Good.” 

While they spoke, Martha sidled up to JJ, giving him a nudge to get his attention. “You still want to talk about it, JJ?”

He looked over, seeing a four foot long bolt action rifle slung over her shoulder. “No, I think I’m good. We’ll talk about this another day probably.” 

Miss Oliver stood out in front of the people going on patrol out in the street and clapped her hands together twice, so JJ and the other people going with stopped talking and turned to her. “Alright, everybody. JJ Dai’s birthday was four days ago, which means he’s 16 now, and he’s volunteered to do his first patrol. The advance party that went to harangue some of those assholes that attacked us last month reported the location of a pocket of infected. Your leader for this patrol, Jeff Almore,” she said, pointing to the man that JJ was on the wall with the day his mother got shot, “knows where it is. He’ll tell you where to go. On the off chance he dies, the directions are in his pocket.” She clapped her hands together one more time, nodding in JJ’s direction. “Y’all be safe, be careful, and get this done. Show JJ what patrol is about and get home safe.” She gave the group another nod, and stepped out of the way of them.

JJ looked around that the folks going on patrol with him. He wished Chris could come, but it was another couple months until he was old enough to go. He knew Jeff was a good shot though, and Martha and Alice went on patrol all the time, aside from the fact that Ellie was with them. The other three adults he didn’t know, but they looked resolute. As the south gate opened in front of them, though, he wished that he could say goodbye to his mom again, and he wished he could be on a horse. Apparently it was close enough not to warrant it. 

The patrol jogged across the open space beyond the southern Jackson gate, knowing that they had cover from up on the wall should they start taking fire. JJ wasn’t too worried about snipers in the treeline though. Martha nudged his shoulder, reading his mind again. “Nice out here, isn’t it?” she said. 

JJ looked towards the nearly cloudless sky with a smile. “Yeah. I know it’s the same, but the sky almost looks different.” As he spoke, Jeff fell back in the running formation to JJ’s side. 

“It’s because there’s no buildings in your periphery,” Jeff said, giving JJ an uncomfortably fatherly smile. “I told Alice up front our route, at least the first leg. Heading out to Snow King Mountain today.” They all broke into the treeline, following one of the footpaths that had been cleared out by more than two decades of patrols. Jeff nodded to Martha and fidgeted with his bushy, brown beard, saying, “Mind if I borrow your friend for a moment, Miss Matthews?”

Martha shrugged, joining the rest of the group as they slowed their pace in the woods. Jeff said to JJ after she’d stepped ahead, leaving them in the back, “Are you alright, JJ?”

JJ blinked a couple times, startled. Jeff hadn’t used his first name, or his nickname, since the day JJ told him when they met. “Yeah, I’m alright. I’m fit, I can run seventy five yards no problem.”

“Oh no, I know you’re fit. If potential injuries weren’t a consideration, I could see you killing at football. I mean, and forgive me for being blunt, your mom got shot six weeks ago, and a few days ago one of our guys got killed hunting down the people that attacked us. And when you heard your mom was in danger, you split from your duty to go help her.” 

Scoffing, JJ turned away from Jeff, focusing on the trail. “Yeah, and if I hadn’t she might have bled to death.”

“Well, Mr. Dai, after you left, some of those assholes tried to scale our section of the wall. If Chris weren’t so short, might have gotten his head taken off, and I couldn’t shoot all of them, so they did get over the wall and nearly killed us anyway.” JJ stopped in his tracks for a moment. Chris hadn’t told him about this at all. Shit, the guy was practically unaffected by the attack. Wasn’t he? 

JJ got moving again, ignoring the hard tone and expression on Mr. Almore. “I’m sorry. Don’t see what that has to do with this patrol, though. Our radios don’t reach out that far, so if they attacked while we were gone I wouldn’t know until I came back anyway.”

“You have friends here though. Martha, Alice if you count pranks and vandalism as friendship. If one of them gets shot, or breaks their arm, or gets bit, are you going to listen to me and let us all help together, or are you going to break away from us and get yourself killed?” 

Shaking his head, JJ said, “My mom already gave me this talk, Jeff. I don’t need you mothering me, too.” He stomped forward to the rest of the group. Apparently, this was sufficient for Jeff’s goal, as he jogged up to the front of the group again. 

Fuming inwardly, JJ fiddled with the folding knife in his pocket. He was too busy watching his shoes to notice Ellie drifting back in the formation to talk to him. “Hey, kid, you good?”

JJ looked up, nodding. “Yeah. Jeff’s just being a worrywart.”

“Yeah, he’ll do that. It’s why Oliver likes to put him with the kids, she thinks he’ll help keep them safe.”

“Do you think that?”

“I mean, I guess, but a lot of people your age and a little older are turning down watch and patrol assignments. If they felt more capable, if they were more capable, I’d quit worrying about the next generation or whatever I guess.” She chuckled for a moment. “I mean, shit, kid, me, you, and Martha are the youngest people out on this patrol.”

JJ raised an eyebrow. “I thought Alice was, like, twenty seven?”

Ellie laughed again. “Nope, she’s thirty eight. She just has miracle skin. I attribute it to her being born this far north. Never had to deal with much sun. My point is, I’m nearly twenty years older than you, and I’m the next youngest person here to you and your friend. If we don’t start making sure that people your age can do this stuff, soon we’re going to be too old and decrepit to.”

JJ nodded at her point, but hit a snag in what she said that furrowed his brow. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned my birthday. I never told you what my birthday is.”

Silence grew between them for a moment while Ellie gave him a hard look. After a solid ten seconds, she looked away. She gave a shrug and said in a tone that did not match her look, “I was your mom’s friend for a while when we were growing up. We stopped hanging out a few months after you were born.”

JJ nodded while the tension between them softened. Then his mind started running. He remembered that day in the Tipsy Bison, the vehemence with which his mom had told Ellie to stay away. He tried to put together what pieces he knew of the two of them. According to Dina, she, and by extension he, were ethnically Jewish, and a lot of people hated Jews as a rule. But Ellie was gay, and in his experience, gay people weren’t racist as often as straights. Could Ellie have made a move on his mom, and Dina had a homophobic reaction? But that didn’t make sense, she was openly bisexual. 

Ellie was a killer too, though, many times over, and according to Martha she tortured people, too. Could she have sexually assaulted her? It wasn’t that much of a stretch to go from torture and murder to rape. He shook his head, mostly dismissing the suspicion. He couldn’t see someone like Ellie, who was as nice to him as she was, being that kind of vile. Shaking his head, he came to a decision. Confrontation was hard, and he hated doing it, so he’d ask Martha about Ellie rather than asking Ellie herself why his mom hated her. 

“Alright, folks,” Jeff said at the front of the formation, stopping and turning back to look at them. Everyone stopped to pay attention. “Here’s the situation: it looks like a group of people were camping out in a cave part way up the mountain, and one or more of them was infected, and they all turned. There’s at least eight of them, all of them runners as far as we know. We all need to shut up if we can, get there quietly. That way, if we do this right, we can kill them all with a volley or two. Any questions?” 

Nobody had any questions, so they got ready and slowed their approach. JJ unslung his SKS and flipped the spike bayonet out, chewing his lower lip. The quiet of their footsteps, carefully avoiding dry leaves and other noisy foliage, took some of the magic out of being beyond the walls of Jackson. 

Martha saw JJ’s nerves and gave him a shoulder squeeze by way of reassurance while they walked. She had her own Russian designed rifle in her hands, a Mosin-Nagant. She gave him a genuine smile that simultaneously put him at ease and made a butterfly flutter about his stomach. Then she turned her attention back to her feet and the path ahead. 

They managed to approach the cave without much issue. Nestled into a sheer face of Snow King Mountain, the ten foot wide, six foot tall crevice yawned before them some thirty yards away when Jeff raised a closed fist to command them all to stop. Martha pulled JJ behind some foliage as a runner stumbled out of the cave, muttering gibberish and scratching at its already bleeding scalp. 

Jeff whispered to the gathered group, barely audible, “Here’s the plan.” He pulled a piece of chalky rock from his backpack. “This is talcite. It’ll shatter when I throw it against the mouth of the cave, drawing them out so we don’t have to fight them in the dark. Once they’re out, we light them up.” 

“I could take out a few quietly once they’re out,” Ellie whispered, an arrow already nocked on her recurve bow. 

Fidgeting with his beard, Jeff shook his head. “We’ll see. If they trickle out, shoot them. If they all come out at once, I don’t want to risk them spotting us and swarming. I don’t think most of us can outrun them long.” As if to make his point for him, one of the joints belonging to the grey bearded man on JJ’s left creaked audibly. 

Ellie sighed, but nodded. Jeff looked to the rest of them, nodding for them to get ready. JJ, his heart hammering in his ears, shouldered his rifle. Jeff looked to him last and, with a nod, JJ confirmed that he was as ready as he was ever going to be. Then, Jeff turned and, with a quiet grunt, launched the piece of rock. 

It shattered against the harder rock of the mouth of the cave. The one out front let out a weird squeak and turned towards the sound, even as more voices echoed from the inside, shrieking together. Ellie’s arrow took the runner out front in the head the instant it stopped, and it toppling added to the noise drawing them outside.

Two sprinted outside, wearing warm, rotted clothes. Another arrow from Ellie planted itself in the heart of the one leading, sending it sputtering and whining to its grave a moment later. Then, the infernal chorus of voices stopped echoing and started sounded clearer as the rest piled out. 

As five of them stumbled over each other to scream out of the cave, Jeff gave the order. “Open fire!” The salvo of gunfire that immediately followed was deafening. JJ didn’t even know if his shot hit, as the one he’d picked to shoot at was torn apart by three different shots at the same time. The three that were still standing recovered from their stumbles and turned their attention towards the Jacksonites. 

JJ put down the lead one with a composure that surprised himself as he put two rounds into its torso. The one following had its skull partially mulched by a shotgun blast. Under the ringing in his ears, JJ heard Jeff shout something else, but a concurrent shot from Martha’s rifle drowned it out and dropped the last runner. JJ felt relief wash over him for a moment. Then the ground shook and he noticed what Jeff was shouting about. 

Older infected poured from the cave. Clickers, one of which was immediately cut down by gunfire, as many as the runners before. JJ froze up for a second before putting a seemingly ineffective shot on one of the leading ones. They felt unstoppable to him, even as a shot blasted the fungal plating off the skull of one of them, sending it to the ground, and an arrow sank through the neck of another. 

JJ felt the ground shake again, shaking him to the bone. And the bloater lumbered out of the cave. His jaw dropped. Festering, acidic pustules grew over its gut, even as fungus grew over and twisted the rest of its body, giving it a jerky limp. Its bellow was muffled beneath the gunfire, but the lower frequency of the sound thrummed through JJ’s chest like an amplified bass guitar. 

JJ’s rapt attention was taken from the horror of the thing as a clicker tore past the rest of the group. He took a hurried, panicked shot at it. Its shoulder burst in blood, but it continued anyway. An image flashed through JJ’s mind. Dina crying at his grandmother’s funeral. Adrenaline surged, and JJ braced, raising his rifle. 

The thing collided with JJ’s bayonet, mindlessly spitting itself. The clicker had a monstrous determination, which kept it from being knocked onto its back, but JJ’s strength and his brace kept him from being knocked backwards either. They stood in a stalemate for a second while its blood poured from the wound in its chest. Then, JJ pushed it back, withdrawing his bayonet at the same time. It charged again, and this time, his bayonet went through its neck. It would go limp a moment later, but JJ didn’t see it. 

Force knocked JJ onto his side. For a split second, he thought it was the man who’d tackled him in Jackson those weeks ago. Then the deformed, screaming face of the clicker descended towards his own. He held it back by a plate on its sternum for the moment, but a fungal plated fist reached for his head, trying to draw him closer. 

Part of the training the kids in Jackson got was basic grappling. This exact situation was why. JJ bucked his hips hard enough to throw the thing off balance before sweeping its arm out from under it with his own. As its face sailed over his own, he rolled over on top of it. He reached for the pistol that should have been in the back of his pants, but he didn’t feel it in that split second, and so went for the next best thing: the knife on his belt. 

The clicker was mostly plated in fungus, but like any plate armor, it needed gaps to be able to move. One of those was most of its neck. JJ jammed his knife into its neck, ripping it out and to the side along its jawline. A few seconds later, it stopped scrabbling against him quite so fiercely, and JJ was able to back up to his feet off it. It struggled after him, but lost its strength before it could reach him. 

An explosion went off to JJ’s right. Having been closer to the fighting this time, the ringing in JJ’s ears made it sound like a muffled whump. He turned, seeing the bloater staggering backwards, a significant portion of its fungal plates coming down around it in bloody chunks after the explosion. While it staggered, Ellie launched several arrows into its newly vulnerable areas, arrows sinking in down to the fletching. 

JJ glanced around for his rifle, wanting to help. It was still stuck in the neck of the clicker that’d collapsed earlier, and he hurried over, kneeling to try to pull it out. He felt a grinding as he wrenched and twisted though, and shook his head, assuming it was stuck in the vertebrae. Turning back to the bloater, he reached for his pistol. This time, he found it. 

The massive thing was charging down Jeff then. The older man dumped three shotgun shells into it as it charged, sliding the pump back and forth with a mechanical efficiency. At the last moment, he dove out of the way, the bloater slamming into the tree Jeff was standing in front of.

Like a matador, JJ thought, as Jeff and Ellie together riddled its back with lead and arrows. Its strength finally began to fade, and it collapsed to one knee. Jeff lifted his shotgun to take its head off, but Ellie put a hand on the barrel, beckoning JJ over at the same time. 

As JJ sprinted over, the bloater giving low moans, the gunshots became less frequent around them while the other Jacksonites finished off the clickers. Ellie met him halfway, shouting to get through the ringing, “We took off the armor on its back. You should be able to get it in the heart.” She nodded to his 1911 in his hand. 

Still a bit twitchy from the fight, his hands sticky with blood, JJ lifted his pistol. The thing knelt there, giving shuddering bellows, more like a dying moose right then than one of the monsters that had destroyed the world. Two shots from JJ’s pistol later, it finally slumped to the ground and breathed its last. Ellie gave him a strong squeeze on his shoulder and a nod.

The next few hours were a haze. Martha fretted over the scrapes and bruises from his clicker encounter, but found nothing that was an infection risk. The rest of the group ventured into the cave, masks on, and burnt the cordyceps growing on the walls with molotov cocktails made from moonshine jellied with ancient gasoline and motor oil. He cleaned his hands of the infected blood vigorously. Ellie decapitated the clicker his bayonet was stuck in. The bayonet was bent, but was still usable after Alice bent it back into place over her thigh. JJ never thought the little Asian woman that laughed at his stupid pranks had the strength for that. 

He finally got back into his head for a few minutes when his mom greeted him at the gate. When it had finished creaking open, she lunged forward off her crutches and wrapped him up in a hug tighter than he thought was really necessary. “Okay, okay, mom,” he chuckled, squeezing her back, though not as hard. 

She pulled back slightly, her arms still around him and a big smile on her face. “You know, I’m not very religious,” she said, “but the last seven hours had me praying.”

“I understand.” He gave her a serious look, and suddenly the numb haze he’d been under the past few hours vanished. He wrapped her back up in a tight hug, the gates shutting behind them. 

“Your kid’s a real badass, Miss Ehrlich,” JJ heard Martha say from off to the side. He looked up to see her with a sarcastic grin a mile wide on her face. He could only imagine the momma’s boy teasing she’d give him at school. “He got blindsided by a clicker, and I was about to help him out when he killed it on his own. With a knife.” Martha chuckled, her expression adopting a hint of disbelief and admiration behind the sarcasm. “A fucking knife.”

Dina raised her eyebrows, turning to JJ with a look of pride and parental concern in equal measure. “A knife? Use your pistol next time, for God’s sake. So much more reliable.”

JJ rolled his eyes. “I couldn’t grab it quick enough. I was losing control, and then Martha really would have had to save my ass.”

Martha cackled. “At least you can admit it. More than I can say for most of the men that go out there.”

The smile on Dina’s face faded for a moment. “Your dad would be so damned proud.” It took back up. “Shit, what am I saying? I’m proud! My boy’s first group patrol.” She wrapped him back up tight for a moment.

“Mooom,” he whined. 

“Nope,” Dina said, “You’re not going to do that teenage boy thing where you can’t take your mother’s love this time, JJ. No, we’re going home, and I’m baking you a fucking pie.” Lowering her voice, she added, “I’ll even egg Alice’s house with you if you want. Or at least ding dong ditch her.”

JJ wanted to. He’d never gotten up to mischief with his mom, but right then that sounded good. His hand trembled though, and his wrist hurt from the force with which he’d stabbed the clickers. He forced it into a fist to calm it for a moment. “I think I’m good with the pie, mom.”

**********

Part of the training the kids in Jackson got was basic grappling. This exact situation was why. JJ bucked his hips hard enough to throw the thing off balance before sweeping its arm out from under it with his own. As its face sailed over his own, he rolled over on top of it. He reached for the pistol that should have been in the back of his pants, but he didn’t feel it in that split second, and so went for the next best thing: the knife on his belt. 

The clicker was mostly plated in fungus, but like any plate armor, it needed gaps to be able to move. One of those was most of its neck. JJ jammed his knife into its neck, ripping it out and to the side along its jawline. A few seconds later, it stopped scrabbling against him quite so fiercely, and JJ was able to back up to his feet off it. It struggled after him, but lost its strength before it could reach him. 

A scream went off to JJ’s right. Turning, the bloater had her leg. It was twisting it, mashing it. Her leg snapped above the knee in a spray of bloody bone, and JJ nearly vomited, knowing in a distant and present way that open femur fractures wouldn’t make it back uninfected this far from Jackson.

The bloated tossed her to JJ’s feet. It was Dina with her pitiful, wheezing deer screams, before the bloater bellowed and charged at the two of them. JJ drew his pistol and fired, dumping the entire magazine into the thing, to no effect. The bloater punched him in the jaw, sending him reeling, and when he looked back, it’d snapped Martha’s back on the ground with a stomp. 

JJ fumbled to change magazines. He tried to put the loaded magazine into the pistol after dropping the empty one, but it wouldn’t slide into the grip. Then, Ellie screamed, and JJ watched as the bloater bashed her head into pulp with three punches, its foot still on her back.

Five familiar rifle shots went off, each one slamming the bloater’s head with what JJ knew to be .30-30 rounds. It fell onto its side, headless. And Jesse stepped into JJ’s view. Looking at his father for the first time, the man looked at the dead woman on the ground, back to JJ, and shook his head, his expression full of disdain. JJ stood frozen as the bloater stood back up, its head a bloody hole, and ripped off his father’s arm. Jesse’s scream was silent, and in that weird, dreamlike way, JJ knew that it was because he’d never heard his voice, and thus wouldn’t know how to put it into a nightmare.

**********

It was chilly in JJ’s room when he woke up, but his hair still stuck to his forehead with sweat. He sat up straight, noticing with a weird laugh that his nipples were hard from the cold, like in that erotic novel Chris gave him, since, “Your mom would probably burn any porno mags she found, but books are the bread and butter of parents.” The memory of that laughing day with his friend comforted him for a moment while he rubbed his eyes. 

Then he remembered what Jeff had said. After JJ abandoned his post, the attackers scaled the wall, and nearly killed him and Chris. Almost worse than that was that Chris had never mentioned it. 

JJ tried to go back to sleep for a while. The images kept flashing under his eyelids though, and with them came a faster beating heart and a certain amount of anxious adrenaline. Shaking his head, JJ got out of bed. He gave his underarm a sniff, his sleep-addled brain neglecting to remind him that he’d taken an hour long hot bath before bed. 

JJ swapped out his pajama bottoms with thick, canvas pants, and put on a thermal shirt and his jacket. He’d usually wear boots on a night as cold as this one, but since he started sneaking out occasionally a few years ago, he kept a pair of softer soled skating shoes in his closet. 

Before climbing out his bedroom window, JJ considered talking to his mom about the nightmare. That wasn’t an option at all in his mind. Can’t worry mom, not while she’s recovering, he told himself. Couldn’t be Martha either. He didn’t want to worry her, especially not if he was ever going to grow the balls necessary to ask her out. Halfway down the gutter pipe out his bedroom window, the cold of the metal seeping through his leather gloves, he realized he couldn’t talk to Chris right then either, even if that’s where he’d usually go. There was no telling how upset the guy actually was with him for leaving him to die. 

JJ determined to himself that he’d just go for a night run. Burn off the energy so that he could get to sleep. The cold air burned his throat as he slowly started breathing heavier, through his mouth, and the pain associated with that meant that it almost came as a relief when he realized that he was unconsciously running towards Ellie’s house. As he stopped running in front of the house, he realized that wasn’t the worst place to be. She’d said he was always welcome, and if anything Martha had said about her was true, then she had to know how to cope with the bullshit that he was dealing with. 

Stepping up, he realized that there was light filtering through the living room window. He hesitated for a moment before knocking. Immediately, he regretted it, as he heard not just her muffled voice, but another woman’s. Then, he caught Ellie’s giggle through the door, and he was ten again, his blood running cold. 

Ellie answered the door in a short sleeved tee shirt and panties. The smile on her unusually rosy cheeks faded when she saw him there. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

JJ asked himself the same question. Judging by her state of undress, her obvious lack of bra, and the bite marks on her neck, it didn’t take long for JJ to figure out what she was up to. “Um, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was interrupting-”

“No, Jesse, it’s not what it looks like.” As she kept talking, JJ caught a slur in her speech, and a sway in her standing. “I swear I’m not cheating on Dina. It’s, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Looking down and away, she asked herself the question more than whoever she saw standing before her. JJ assumed her drunkenness was putting her in a state of confusion. He felt his own state calming down a little bit as he tried to figure out just what was going on with Ellie. 

“You didn’t answer my question, though,” she said, looking up with a confused suspicion. “Abby shot you in the face. And the dead, the dead, the dead don’t come back.” She added to herself, in a slurred mutter, “Even if I pray.”

JJ wanted to leave her alone. He didn’t want to deal with whatever this was. He didn’t want to parse the weird mix of hate and regret and resignation in Ellie’s blank stare. He wanted to go back to sleep very little, but at least that kind of weird, confusing, and upsetting was more understandable. “Look, I’ll just get out of your hair. I shouldn’t have come-”

The other woman’s voice called from deeper in the house. “Ellie! Who’s there?!” She sounded like she had a drunken slur in her voice, too.

Ellie shouted over her shoulder, “Be back in a minute, Cat! I’m almost done!” 

JJ took a couple steps back during the exchange, tempted to sprint away, but Ellie rested the door on the latch behind her, saying, “Jesse, wait.” JJ had been a deer in headlights more than enough the past day, but he was one once again. “I don’t know what kind of ghost of Christmas past bullshit is going on, but if you visit Dina, tell her I’m sorry. And if you talk to potato, tell him I wish I could have watched him grow up.” She nodded, and waved JJ away. “Okay, be free, ghost. I release you from your bond or whatever.” Without waiting for a response, she turned and stepped back into her house. 

JJ stumbled backwards, trying to put together the words into something that made any kind of sense. He didn’t know if it was shock or tiredness, but he couldn’t do it. Not right then. One thing that he did know though: he had to talk to Martha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter should be up sooner than the previous ones have been! And don't forget to feed your author if you like what you've been reading! Kudos are nice, comments are great, whether they're one word or an essay.


	5. Killer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ, Martha, and Chris talk about Ellie, and some other, more typically teenaged things. Ellie has a confrontation or two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter include: referenced violence against children, referenced cannibalism, referenced torture, abuse, foul language, alcohol abuse, underage use of alcohol, and teenage romantic discomfort. 
> 
> This chapter and the next are rough, guys. Make sure you're in an okay place before reading. 
> 
> Song for this chapter: Killer by Phoebe Bridgers. Link: https://open.spotify.com/track/7bWiQ6WWYmdVoo53ffeIX2?si=iVNz5xKQRWyDVOy8F3mugw

School let out at the normal time when JJ went back the following day. As he left the building, he spotted Martha in the flood of students. Chris grabbed him by the upper arm and pulled him off the side before he could flag her down, though. 

Out in the street, Chris let go of JJ’s arm. The bigger boy winced. Chris’s grip was stronger than he expected. “Hey, JJ, are you okay? You’ve been a little out of it lately.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Look, I gotta get going-”

Chris huffed. “I know you’ve been avoiding me, man.” Shaking his head, Chris let out his frustration in his tone. “If you’re old enough to be out there killing infected, then you’re old enough to act like an adult and tell me what’s going on with you.”

“Chris, I’m fine,” JJ insisted.

“Dude, you slept straight through Chemistry in Anatomy. It’s your favorite class; you usually take enough notes for the whole damned town.” 

JJ ground his teeth, growing in frustration. “Chris, I can’t do this right now. I need to talk to Martha. There’s shit I need to figure out with her.”

“JJ, if you’re too fucked up to sleep long enough to stay awake in class, then you’re too fucked up to be getting into a relationship.” JJ couldn’t think of a clever retort, and Chris continued on. “I haven’t had an actual conversation with you outside of school since the attack. You’ve been spending all your time with that archer chick, you keep getting lost in the sauce.” Chris gave him a hard, caring look in the eye. “You know that if she’s doing bad shit to you, you can talk to me, right?”

JJ wiped his face with his hand, despite having no sweat or tears on it. “Yeah, dude, I’m trying to talk to Martha because I need to figure out some things about Ellie, and she knows some things.”

“I’ll come with you, then.” 

JJ blinked. “Why?”

Chris shrugged. “I’m smart, I can help you figure shit out, and, oh yeah, I’m your best friend of seven years and I actually care about you.” The last point he punctuated with a playful punch to JJ’s more muscled shoulder. 

Despite his misgivings about that day on the wall with Chris, JJ let himself be comforted. “Alright. Let’s go catch up to her.”

The two of them caught up to Martha around the corner. JJ called after her, “Martha! Hang on a minute.”

Martha stopped for a moment, fidgeting with a knot in her dark, kinked hair as she turned around. “Hey, Josie. Chris. What’s up?”

JJ jogged up to her with Chris, arriving a bit before his friend with the shorter legs. “I wanted to have that conversation with you. About Ellie.” 

Martha raised her eyebrows. “Ok, cool. I’ve got a spot we can chat. Chris coming with us?”

“Yeah, he’s my best friend. He can be trusted.”

Martha blinked a few times, her eyebrows staying high. “Hang on. I thought you two were an item?”

Chris shrugged, completely deadpan as he said, “What do you say, JJ, want to make out?”

The two burst into laughter almost immediately, obviously dismissing the idea. Martha groaned aloud, saying, “Goddammit, that was supposed to be a tease against your masculinity, not an invitation to actually be funny. Come on, let’s go.” 

They walked through the streets of Jackson for a couple minutes before they reached a less densely populated block and Chris asked, “So, where exactly are we going?”

“There’s a corner of the wall that got damaged by infected a few years ago. They over reinforced it, so the guards don’t patrol it as frequently as the other spots. Plus it’s got a bit to get out of the rain or the snow if you want. I’ve made it a bit nicer.”

They arrived at the spot a few minutes later. Some extra braces propped up against the corner, and the wood there did stick out a little farther than on other spots of the wall. Up closer though, Chris and JJ noticed that there was a tarp strung up over much of the slanted braces, with some linens set up underneath it. 

“Took a couple years to make it this nice,” Martha said. “Grabbed a couple old blankets that people wouldn’t miss, marked a sleeping bag as destroyed on an overnight patrol, and repurposed a ruined tent, and voila. Don’t know if it’ll be comfy for three people though.” 

As the three of them piled in, JJ said, “It is a bit snug.” In order to settle in between the blanket padded braces, Martha’s thigh was pressed up against his, and Chris was halfway on his lap. Butterflies battered his stomach from being so close to her. 

Martha pulled a bottle from under one of the blankets and unscrewed the top. From the smell, JJ could tell it was beer. Chris chuckled to himself. “You offering?”

Martha put the bottle in the hand opposite from Chris. “Fuck no. Just need some beer to make telling this story easier.” She leaned back, taking a deep pull from the bottle, and sighed. “Alright, alright. I’ll tell you what I know about Ellie, and I’ll tell you how I know it. Settle in and get comfortable, because it’s a story.” The boys squirmed for a second, trying not to get too uncomfortably close to each other before Martha groaned and said, “For God’s sake, just sit on his lap, Chris. I seriously fucking doubt that I’m so hot he’s got a boner already.” 

Chris laughed hard enough to snort and climbed the rest of the way onto JJ’s lap while JJ blushed deeply. JJ looked for somewhere to put his hands that wasn’t around Chris, and settled on putting them in his jacket pockets. Despite all reason, JJ did feel his crotch stirring for a moment, and thought a silent prayer to any gods that might be listening to give him erectile dysfunction. “Just tell the story, Martha,” JJ said, hoping that whatever horrible shit she said would get rid of it for him.

Smirking at the boys, Martha said, “Alright, alright. Don’t get your panties in a twist. So, here’s what I know about Ellie: she’s killed people. Like, a fuck ton of people. She’s really goddamned good at it, and she’s only gotten better over the years. And she was the head people hunter for the old leader, Maria.”

Her words sat between them all, despite their proximity. JJ’s hope had a basis in reality, too, though it wasn’t nearly as comforting as he’d wanted it to be. “Alright,” JJ said, “and how do you know that?”

Maria nodded, taking another sip of her beer. Her expression and tone had sobered completely. “My dad, mostly.” She chewed her tongue for a moment and took a deep breath. “So, twelve years ago, my dad’s brother got killed. I was five. He left for a couple years after Uncle Victor died, and when dad came back he was a different person. Colder, harder, angrier. He got some better, eventually, but let’s just say that this little spot here has been nice for hiding.”

“Shit,” Chris said. “He always seemed like a good guy to me.”

“Yeah, he usually is. Usually keeps the pain and shit inside him. Course, it’s like a soda bottle that gets shaken up all the time. If he doesn’t let it out little bits at a time, then when he does he explodes.” Another sip of the beer. “Anyway, he got some better. Just some, but maybe enough. And a couple years ago, he told me what happened when I was little. Apparently, Uncle Vic got killed in a town, some ways to the south, trying to save a crying kid from a gang of infected, only it wasn’t the infected that killed Victor. It was this group of cannibals.”

She went quiet for a minute, and JJ put a hand on her shoulder, trying to be some kind of comfort. She showed him a thankful smile, but slid his hand off her. “Anyway, my dad was out there with him. Said that there were ten of them there, and he couldn’t fight them all, so he hid after they shot his brother. And there was a bunch of noise with Uncle Victor trying to rescue the kid, so the cannibals couldn’t afford to stick around or be slowed down, so what they did was, they took Uncle Vic’s legs and buttocks. Same for that kid. Apparently they’re good eating or some shit.

So, dad got back here. And when he told Maria and the rest of the leaders at the time what happened, apparently Ellie got really, really quiet. And when my dad asked to go after them, Maria panicked and put him under house arrest. Ellie got him out though, and the two of them went after the cannibals.” Martha finished her drink and put the bottle down, but kept a hand around it. It was then that JJ noticed she was squeezing it hard enough to tremble. 

“That’s horrifying,” JJ said, not knowing anything else to say. It was the truth, it was what he felt. If it weren’t for the warmth of his friends with him, he might have had a panic attack thinking about what she said and what she and her father went through. 

“Yep,” Martha said. “Apparently, on the way down to find them, Ellie got real talkative. Just, weirdly talkative. She’d had a run in with that group herself, eight years beforehand, when she was a kid. Apparently, she was fourteen when she butchered the leader with his own machete. She told him that she just wanted to see these people gone from the world, that she didn’t want any other people to suffer because of them, but when it came to the violence, she wasn’t, well.” 

Martha let out a weird, humorless laugh, staring straight ahead. “Dad told me about what happened after their second fight with the group. It was bigger than just the ten guys that killed Uncle Vic. After the fight, there were two survivors. One of them was one of the guys that had killed Uncle Victor. She took a bloody arrow that’d broken, and put it in the mouth of one of the guys. She had him write out where the others were. Then she had the other guy. Their stories didn’t match up though. So she started taking out teeth from the one guy. 

“Turns out he was the one that was telling the truth. According to dad, she wasn’t bothered by that at all, and when they finally got their story straight, she just stabbed the guy that hadn’t been there for Uncle Vic, and then gave the knife to my dad.” She drummed her fingers on her knee. “Dad said that he knew how to kill him quick, but he didn’t. Stabbed him in the gut. Let him die of sepsis.”

“Jesus,” Chris said. He glanced at JJ. “Or Yahweh, I guess.” He put on a half smirk, but the tone of the group very much told him the joke wasn’t appreciated. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Martha said. “Anyway, they caught up to the rest of them. Ellie killed them in the worst ways she could manage a lot of the time. She had plenty of arrows and bullets, but used explosives and firebombs whenever she could get away with it, according to my dad. Didn’t sound like someone just out there to stop evil, to me.” Her voice got choked up, and JJ caught water in her hazel eyes under the shadow of the tarp. “Dad got into it. They were toying with them at the end, a little bit at least. 

“They saved the guy who proposed they take just part of my uncle for last. Ellie set up a trip mine that took off his legs, and then they tied tourniquets around his thighs so they could beat him the rest of the way dead. Said something about poetic justice.” Another humorless chuckle from Martha. “If that’s her idea of poetry, then I don’t want to read a fucking thing that she’s ever written.” She swallowed back a rising sob and let out a shuddering breath, squeezing the empty bottle some more. 

They let the story settle between themselves for a minute or so, Martha with her head in her hands, taking shuddering breaths. JJ looked to Chris about then, not certain if he should try to comfort her or not. Chris motioned for him to do so, his expression saying, “Fucking obviously.”

JJ put his palm on Martha’s upper back and rubbed in circles like Dina did for him sometimes, usually when he was sick. “Hey, Martha,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “It’s okay. Well, it’s not okay that it happened, but it’s over with, and your old man’s getting better, like you said. Even if it’s not okay now, it will be someday.”

Martha sniffled and laughed sardonically, pulling back from her hands to look at JJ. Her lower eyelids were wet. “No it won’t. Every person on the planet could get vaccinated tomorrow, some scientist in Antarctica could release a poison into the atmosphere that kills Cordyceps, and we would still be fucked. What happened to dad and Uncle Vic is the norm. This place we live, this place is the exception.” The vitriol in her tone and the fury in her expression scared JJ a little bit. 

Shaking her head, Martha looked away from the boys with a sigh. “I appreciate you trying, Josie. JJ. You two being here does make it a little easier to talk about and deal with I guess.” Another, deeper sigh. “So, that’s what I know about Ellie. She tortures people, and she turned my dad into somebody that he wasn’t. At least, I don’t think he was the same before he left with her.”

JJ believed her story, but he had doubts about Ellie’s involvement with turning Mr. Matthews into someone he wasn’t. He wasn’t anywhere near stupid enough to actually say it though. “Well, I’m here for you, Marty.” 

Looking back up at JJ, Martha smirked. It looked conflicted for a second before she leaned into it and JJ smiled back. She glanced between him and Chris. “You know, you two would make a cute couple. The hunk and the twink.” 

Chris’s expression turned to a kind of mortified that JJ recognized as playful. Chris shoved Martha against the support while she cackled. “I am not a fucking twink!” As Martha kept cackling, Chris crossed his arms and scowled. “If anything I’m a twunk.”

JJ knit his brow, a smile on his face. “Okay, okay, you’ve gotta explain this to me. I know the word hunk, and I’m flattered Martha, but twink? Twunk? What’s that?”

“It’s a fucking gay porn archetype,” Chris grumbled. “Twink’s a skinny, effeminate guy that usually shaves, twunk is a mix between twink and hunk.” Turning back to Martha, Chris lifted an arm, pointing at his armpit. “I’ve got armpit hair, Martha! If I was a twink, then I’d shave it, dumbass.”

The amusement on Martha’s face turned somewhat more mischievous. “And how do you know what gay porn archetypes are, Chris, if you haven’t watched it?”

Chris’s jaw dropped and his face slowly turned redder while Martha started cackling again. Shaking his head, Chris shoved off of JJ’s lap and stormed out of Martha’s hideout. Martha leaned out, calling after him, “Where are you going Chris? I was just poking fun!” Peeking out with her, JJ caught Chris flipping her off as he walked away.

The two of them sat back in the hideout, JJ giggling but some actual concern on Martha’s face. “You think he’s going to be okay? I mean, I know I can be a bitch, but I didn’t want to actually piss him off.”

JJ shrugged. “I mean, probably. He’s just proud. Course, I didn’t know he watches gay porn, or that he was bi at all.” As the amusement over the situation died down, some odd thoughts occurred to JJ. Dina told him about how sometimes she had trouble getting physically close to straight women, especially ones she was attracted to, because she didn’t want them to see her as predatory. Could that have been why Chris was reluctant to settle on JJ’s lap? And why was JJ disappointed that he was?

Thankfully, being in close proximity to Martha again got rid of some of those questions about his sexuality. He pulled his knees up close to himself on the off chance he got stiff again. “You know,” Martha said, “it wasn’t just a joke when I was wondering if you two were an item. Think it was just the way you look at each other though. Most straight guys don’t actually show affection like that.”

JJ shrugged, butterflies kicking up in his stomach and his tongue drying. Without Chris there, there was a chance, a small, but non zero chance, that something could happen with him and Martha, and that was distracting even more than how cute Chris’s face looked when he blushed. “Well, he’s been my friend even longer than you. Kind of hard to be someone’s friend that long and keep pretending you don’t give a shit about them.”

“Oh, you give a shit about him, huh?” Martha grinned. “Sounds pretty gay to me. Didn’t know your type was skinny black boys. I imagine he’d feel pretty safe in your arms though.”

JJ opened and shut his mouth once, trying to find something to say. All the confusion and inward pressure of the situation kept him from saying anything more than a drawn out, “Uhhh.” Goddammit, he thought, I should have written a poem or picked her flowers or, or, something.

Martha’s mischievous grin broadened at how tongue tied JJ was. “Gotta admit, I kind of want to find out.”

“Well. Um.” JJ glanced at the mouth of the hideout, where Chris had stalked off through. “I’m pretty sure I’m straight, so I don’t think that’s really an option?”

Martha scoffed through her grin. “I keep on forgetting you don’t know how figurative language and implication works. I mean,” she said, grabbing a heavy arm and throwing it around her shoulders, “I wanted to see if it’d feel safe to be in your arms.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Turns out my suspicion was right.”

JJ let out a quick, bitten off laugh. His heart was beating too fast, and if he laughed freely, it might burst. They stayed snuggled like that for a minute or so before Martha spoke up again, almost making JJ jump. 

“So, since you’re straight,” she said, a hint of disbelief behind it, “your type isn’t skinny black boys. What kind of girls do you like? Big girls? Smart girls? White girls? Redheads? I know a redhead that likes strong guys like you, but she’s eighteen and I don’t know if you’d be comfortable with that. Pretty sure she’d wait for you though.”

“Um.” The tension roiling in his gut kept him from talking for a moment as he screamed in his head to just say something. Finally, the tension snapped and he said, his eyes squeezed shut, “I like mixed girls with hazel eyes and freckles on the back of her hands.” He felt Martha shift off of him slightly, and sighed, full of guilt. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you that right now. You just spilled your guts to me, and here I am trying to flirt or some stupid-”

She grabbed his hand and put the other on his cheek. JJ wrenched his eyes open. “JJ. You’re doing nothing wrong.” A gentler smile crossed her lips than he was used to from her. Usually they had sarcasm or mischief or schadenfreude behind them, but right then it was all genuine. “That’s all I wanted to hear.” She leaned in and kissed him. 

JJ’s eyes widened with shock, that she was kissing him after he’d imagined it a thousand times, that she was being okay with it, that what he’d hoped was flirtation actually was. Then, she pressed her lips a little harder, and he melted into the kiss. A hand went around to her back, another her shoulder. 

Part of him wanted to push back more. He wanted to feel her up, or put his tongue in her mouth, be confident like the guys in the movies. A couple things held him back. One was a persistent, as yet unspecified guilt, despite what she’d told him before kissing him. The other was that kissing her like this, with her taking the lead, deepening the kiss and pulling him in by his waist, putting one of her legs over his to get a better angle, it felt right. 

They got as far as Martha putting her tongue in his mouth and getting a hand under his jacket and shirt to feel his firm abdomen before she pulled back. She sat back by his side, breathing heavily. JJ absentmindedly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, fixing her with an awestruck gaze. 

Martha licked her lips clean and smirked. “You kiss like a girl.” 

JJ blinked a few times. “Huh?”

“Yeah. When I make out with guys, they usually put their hands on my waist or my tits. When it’s girls, they usually put their hands on my back or my shoulders. You’re back and shoulders, Josie.” Her teasing smile had plenty of affection behind it. “Plus you kind of melted when you got into it. When guys get into it, they usually pull me closer and take over a bit.”

“I’m sorry?”

Martha shrugged. “Don’t be.” Her teasing smile turned more genuine again. “It was sweet. And cute.” She chuckled. “And kind of hot. You know. Three of the reasons I like you.” 

JJ chuckled. “You like me that much and you got me a stick for my birthday.”

“Oh, shut up! You know you cracked the fuck up when you unwrapped that thing and realized what it was.”

“Only because you were laughing. Never could help myself when you start laughing.” His admiring smile faded for a moment. What he just said was just as true for Chris. Oh, fuck.

Martha turned away for a moment, changing the subject before she had to interpret that change in expression. “That wasn’t really what I got you for your birthday.” She dug under the blankets, getting to a bottom layer of tent canvas between them and the mud, and pulled out a piece of paper. “I actually wrote you a thing. Mostly a letter.” JJ reached for it, but she pulled it away. “I didn’t give it to you because I didn’t know if it said what I really wanted it to say, at least not in text. So I’m going to read it out loud to make sure I get the tone right.” 

The seriousness in tone on her face and in her voice was just as jarring as it was when she told him about her dad’s bloody journey with Ellie. 

“JJ,

You’re my friend. Or at least, I hope you are. You’ve been there for four breakups, from congratulating me on my first kiss to decking Brandon after he cheated on me. I keep on going back to those moments sometimes. I wish I’d kissed you after you hit Brandon, standing over him, looking strong. Before your mom got there and chewed you out.” She chuckled as she read the next line. “I wish I grabbed your butt when you greeted me after my first patrol. I wish you were my first kiss instead of Jackie. I wish I could stop worrying you’re in love with Chris and just ask you out. I wish I knew how to paint or sing or something so you’d know how much I love you.” 

Martha looked up to JJ, searching for a reaction. He shoved down the guilt and smiled as broadly as he felt, saying, “And you said I’m sweet.” 

He reached to hold her hand, but she gently pulled back, some weird kind of disappointment on her face while she looked at the hand. “It’s not done yet. 

“JJ, I wish I knew how to tell you I’m scared. I wish I knew how to pull you out of your own head. You snap too much, eat too little. When I see you, you complain about how tired and sore you are from training, and I want to scream. I wish I knew if I wanted to scream at you or at her.” The tone in her voice let JJ know which “her” she was talking about. He hardened his heart while his back stiffened. “I love you as you are, and I don’t want to lose that by watching you turn into someone you’re not. I learned to keep the pain away with jokes and fucking around and talking to people, mostly you, but I feel like you’re just embracing yours. Most of all, I wish that I knew getting you away from her would pull you out of this spiral.

“So happy birthday, JJ. Please don’t let it be the last one you have. For me and for your mom if not for you.” 

They sat in silence for a bit after she finished reading. Neither of them could look each other in the eye. Finally, when JJ broke the silence, he said, “I’m not going to get myself killed, Martha. And I’m not going to kill myself.” At least I figured out why I’m so guilty, he thought in the beat of silence between them. “I can’t stop training with Ellie, either.” Martha turned away, sniffling and hardening her expression. “I’m pretty sure if she weren’t there with her bomb arrows, Jeff would be dead right now.”

Martha shook her head and scooched as far away as the small space would allow her. “That’s what I hate most about her. No matter what she does, she gets to keep her friends. My dad, Tommy Miller, the old leader, Maria.”

For a moment, JJ just wondered who the hell Tommy Miller was, before something about Ellie clicked in his head. “No, she doesn’t get to keep her friends. My mom hates her. And they used to be friends, at the least friends.” He rambled as he finally put two and two together. “From the conversation I had with Ellie last night, I think they were dating when my dad died, which is all kind of confusing-”

“Why were you talking with Ellie last night?” Concern showed in Martha’s tight closed mouth and furrowed brow. 

JJ waved the concern away with a hand, focusing on finishing his conclusions. “I was having nightmares and I went to go talk to her. When I knocked on her door though, she was drunk, and she had somebody over, somebody called Cat.” JJ paused for a moment, stringing together words in his head for the next sentence, when Martha interrupted. 

“You could have talked to me. Or Chris, or your mom.” She scoffed. “Course you had nightmares and talked to the murderer. You’ve got bags under the bags under your eyes.” She shook her head, her expression turning to incredulity. “I’d have thought, after yesterday, that it was pretty fucking obvious how much I cared about you.” Her tone filled with anger. “I screamed so hard when you got tackled by that clicker that I lost my voice, JJ. When we’d finished and I was checking you, it wasn’t just because I was scared of what your mom would do to me if I let you get bit on your first patrol.” She squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed a lump in her throat, but JJ could tell she was on the verge of tears regardless. 

She said, her words very deliberate, “I have no idea what I’d do without you.”

“That’s why I have to keep training with her.” Martha shook her head and opened her mouth, but JJ continued before she could talk. “I don’t think you get it. When I got to that street, six weeks ago, and found my mom shot in the street, I broke. I was vomiting and crying, and when a guy spotted her and went to kill her with a shotgun, I couldn’t do anything because I couldn’t make myself function.” He spoke with an intensity neither him nor Martha knew could come from him. “Ellie saved her life. I don’t know what I’d do without you, or my mom, and I have proof that Ellie’s training has kept any of us from breaking again.”

Martha sat there with her arms folded, quietly and composedly blinking tears down her cheeks, waiting for him to continue. “Training with her has taught me how not to panic in those moments. The first clicker, the one I got with my bayonet. If I hadn’t trained with Ellie, I wouldn’t have thought to brace properly, and it would have tackled me and probably killed me. The other one that did tackle me, I wouldn’t have been able to grapple my way out of that if I was crying and vomiting. I wouldn’t have been able to think of doing it.” He scoffed. “Yeah, she turned me into someone I’m not. She turned me into someone who isn’t a fucking coward.”

Martha’s face twisted into something of fury and devastation, like she’d just experienced both and was about to inflict them on the world. “Get out.”

JJ didn’t quite understand what the tipping point was yet, and moved slowly, climbing out of the hideout and saying, “Martha, you know I still-”

She shoved him the rest of the way out with a boot to the ass. “Get out!” she shrieked, and when JJ hesitated by the mouth of the hideout, she hurled the empty beer bottle at him. With her rage, she didn’t throw it well, and it was easy to dodge. Still, JJ flinched when it shattered against the wall behind him. It felt like it wasn’t the only thing that was breaking. 

**********

JJ stopped running when he hit an empty street. He felt a boiling tide overflowing within his chest, rage and disappointment the likes of which he’d never felt. When his mom was shot, that was just fear. That was run to the edge of the universe kind of feelings, now, now JJ wanted to tear his shirt and beat his breast, he wanted to pull down a Philistine temple with his bare hands and the wrath of God. He wanted to find an empty street and yell and beat the asphalt until the skin on his knuckles tore and his wrist hurt like he just stabbed a clicker charging full force at him. 

So he did. And when he was done, JJ collapsed onto his ass, sobbing hard into his hands, blind and deaf to the world. The back of his mind told him he was stupid. The shaking of his hurt hand could attest to that. After a few minutes, he heard voices, but none of them could get through the blood roaring in his ears. All that mattered was that there was no answer. Training with Ellie kept him alive and could keep his friends and his mom alive, and now, because he was doing that, he’d lost Martha anyway. 

Finally, he realized what he’d said that set Martha off. He implied that what Ellie turned her dad into, or at least what Martha felt like she turned him into, was a good thing. That her dad being a shitty dad for so long was good. That all the pain she’d gone through when he was gone and when he came back was actually a good thing. 

“I’m so fucking stupid,” JJ moaned into his hands. 

A hand landed on his shoulder, the thumb rubbing in little circles, and JJ knew who it belonged to before she spoke. “Hey. Nobody calls my kid stupid.”

The blood stopped roaring in his ears. The tears slowed down a little bit. JJ wiped his nose on his sleeve and peeled his tear soaked hands away from his face to see Dina looking down to him with a concerned smile. A stranger stood behind her, as well as Alice, both talking with hushed, worried tones, though JJ couldn’t catch the words. 

“Hey. Come on.” Dina offered her left hand, even though she and JJ were both right handed. It took JJ a moment to realize that it was because his right hand was still bloody and shaking. She pulled him to his feet, always stronger than she looked. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders once he stood, though still hunched. “Let’s go home. I’m pretty sure there’s still some pie left.”

**********

The doctor had just left the Ehrlich house after confirming that JJ hadn’t broken anything when Dina asked, “So, what happened?”

JJ stared at his hand on his lap, freshly wrapped in white bandages. It took him a couple minutes to figure out how to answer, but Dina waited patiently on the couch beside him. When he finally did respond, JJ said, “I think I ruined everything. With Martha, at least.” With the urgent pain dealt with, JJ was left with a lead weight in his chest. Saying that part out loud made it a little heavier. 

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Where do I start? Do I start when I met her in our shooting class when I was ten? When I was terrified after she shot herself in the foot? Or after her first kiss, when I congratulated her with a weird conflict I didn’t understand? Or do I start when I started training with your ex-girlfriend? 

“Well, she kissed me. And she had just told me some hard stuff about her dad. And she read me a really sweet and really sad letter she wrote to me.” JJ flexed his hand. Somehow, the resulting pain made it a little easier to focus out of the depressed malaise. “And I said some stupid shit about her dad by accident, and she screamed at me and threw things at me. And you said that I should always, always, always break up with a partner that screams at me or tries to hurt me, but I did say that stupid thing, and she was upset, and I think I love her?” 

He looked up from his hand, his mom on the couch next to him, the upset welling back up in the back of his throat and his eyes. “I don’t think she wants anything to do with me, but I don’t know what I’d do if she stopped talking to me for good. I love her.” After a moment, he looked away and nodded to himself. “Even if I could never kiss her again, I love her.”

Dina reached out and hugged her son. She leaned her chin on his head, and JJ admonished himself silently for crying again. “Well,” she said after a moment, “you’ll give her a few days or weeks or however long she needs to calm down a little bit. And you’ll tell her you didn’t mean what you said.”

She waited for him to slow down his crying before adding a comment that did add to the weight in his chest. “You are right, though. You shouldn’t be with this girl until and unless she’s learned how to control her temper. Love’s the most powerful thing, but you need to love yourself first.”

“I love you, mom,” he mumbled into her shirt. 

She looked down, seeing his teary, brown eyes looking up through dead straight, black hair. “That’s all I’ll ever want from you.”

**********

Sometimes, after a rough day, rather than nightmares, JJ had pleasant dreams. He always assumed it was just his brain getting its wires crossed, confusing fear with happiness. Still, he was enjoying having a dream about making love with Martha when pebbles tapping against his bedroom window woke JJ up in the middle of the night. 

Getting up and peeking out, JJ’s first, hopeful thought was that Martha was out there to reconcile with him. Or maybe Chris, though that thought was more tied to the feelings of that dream. He winced, still not knowing what to do with that. Then, he recognized the silhouette in the street, saw the straight hair and the bow in Ellie’s hand. 

A couple minutes later, and he’d shimmied down the drain pipe to the street, having put on his jacket and shoes, but kept the pajama pants on. He stepped towards her, his hurt hand in his jacket pocket since he didn’t want to try to put a glove over it. 

After a moment, Ellie said in an oddly nervous voice, “Hey, kid.”

He lifted his gloved hand. “Hey.”

Another beat of awkward silence before Ellie said, “I, uh, I heard about some of what happened today. You alright?”

“Yeah, I guess.” JJ didn’t know if it was just the high emotions of the day, or the irritation of having his nice dream interrupted, but he was sick of avoiding this confrontation. “How’d you hear about it? Martha’s dad tell you?” He hoped his tone conveyed that he knew something that she might have thought he didn’t.

“Yeah. Andre and I are friends. Erh, Martha’s dad and I. You probably know his name, don’t you?” 

JJ didn’t know why she sounded so nervous, but he had his suspicions. “Yeah, I know his name. So what’s up, why are you out here?”

She chewed her tongue for a moment. “Um, so it was your birthday the other day. I was getting a present together for you, but it wasn’t ready on time. Then, last night happened, and I was rushing to finish it today to give it to you as a sort of apology I guess? Yeah.” She wrung the amputated stumps on her left hand. “And I was going to give it to you tomorrow, but Andre told me some of what happened with you and Martha, what she was willing to give up at least, and I decided to come check up on you anyway.”

“Well, you don’t need to apologize to me. You’re, like, my tutor. You’ve got a life, I interrupted you while you were partying with some chick, it’s fine.” He shrugged.

“So, um, here’s your presents.” She took the bow from over her shoulder and passed it to JJ first. Even with JJ’s limited knowledge, JJ could tell it was a nice one. Freshly lacquered, a little longer and heavier in his testing draw than Ellie’s. “There’s that. And there’s this.” She handed him a little box. In the dark, JJ had trouble telling what it was at first. Once it was in his hand though, he realized it was a Walkman tape player, headphones wrapped carefully around it. Inserted into it was a tape labeled “Green Day presents: American Idiot.” “I thought about giving you my old one, but once I fixed this one up, I realized it sounded better, so here you go.” 

JJ put the tape deck in his jacket pocket, nodding, and unstrung his new bow so as to preserve its longevity. “Thanks. Can I go to bed?” There were more answers to get, but the physical and emotional exhaustion of the day was setting in once again. 

“One last thing. So, I don’t remember a whole lot about what we talked about last night. Don’t suppose I dumped any big secrets on you while I was drunk and high?” Ellie chuckled for a moment, but the humor died quickly at JJ’s lack of amusements. 

“Yeah, kinda. Took me a bit to figure them out. So, my dad got shot in the face by somebody named Abby. That’s a big one.” He started ticking them off on his fingers, trying to keep his emotions tamped down. “You’re my mom’s ex, and you were dating while my dad was alive, which is a little confusing. And you’re dating someone called Cat? Is she the tattoo artist?”

Ellie winced. “It’s, uh, it’s more of a long term hookup. We usually can’t stand each other when we’re sober.” 

Silence started up again, and JJ might have usually been more polite, but he was irritated and tired. “Can I go now? I was having a good dream for fucking once.”

“Um, well, part of why I’m here is to check up on you.”

“At two in the morning?” He rubbed his eyes and sighed. 

“Yeah. I uh, I hate bad dreams, too.” She sniffled against the cold and shrugged. “Well, if you need anything…” Her voice died as her head turned to look over JJ’s shoulder. 

JJ turned, and seeing his mother stepping up with her arms folded, his shoulders sagged. “Oh, don’t let me interrupt,” Dina said, some ire in her tone. “What should he do, if he ever needs anything?”

Ellie swallowed hard. “I was just going to offer some extra support, give him a birthday present.” Her voice was small, and behind the fear, JJ heard no small amount of pain. 

“JJ,” Dina said, “give her back the bow. If you want to go hunting, tell me and I’ll grab it for you.” As JJ passed the bow back, Ellie ran the thumb on her left hand over the stumps there repeatedly. After a moment, Ellie turned to leave, but Dina said first, her voice full of tears, “Ellie, before you go. You’re not his mom. You gave that up, on purpose, and I hope to God it was worth it, but you can’t just go back and pick up what you already left behind. So please.” When she said it this time, it was more of a plea than a furious demand. “Stay the Hell away from my son.”

Ellie didn’t say anything. She just nodded and walked away. 

JJ watched her for a minute before Dina said, “Come on, JJ. It’s cold. Let’s go inside.” 

Back inside, Dina still had her arms folded, more to comfort herself than as a defensive posture this time though. She turned around once they’d made it to the living room and said, “So, I suppose you want some answers, huh kid?” The tears had mostly gone from her voice, but she sniffled after she spoke, and JJ didn’t think it was just from the cold. 

JJ shrugged. “As long as I don’t have to drag them out of you, sure. If I do, then I’ll just go back to bed.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, kid. No need to worry about that.”

In response, JJ slumped onto the couch. Dina joined him a moment later. 

Dina asked, “So, what’s your first question?”

JJ took a moment to put the words together. “What did you mean when you said she gave up being my mom?”

Dina sighed long and deep. “Good question. It’s a bit of a story. I don’t think I can make it short.” She took a moment to think, poking her tongue into her cheek. “I guess we should start with Ellie and me. We were good friends for a few years when we were teenagers. Ellie came to town with a guy called Joel, who was like her dad, though not technically. So, when I was nineteen and she was eighteen, I broke up with your dad before I found out I was pregnant. Ellie and I thought about getting together, but then Joel got killed in a bad way.” She stared off into space for a moment. 

Then she snapped her focus back to JJ. “Ellie was there for when he died. So was Joel’s brother, Tommy. It fucked them up in the head. Tommy went to hunt down the people that killed Joel, and Ellie went next and I went with her because I loved her.” Her lower lip trembled for a split second, but Dina reigned in the emotions. “Your dad followed after us because he loved us, too. Jesse was good like that.” She glanced at the picture on the mantle. 

JJ watched her expression, trying to figure things out before she could manage to put the words together. She had said she loved Ellie, in the past tense. JJ wondered if she still loved her or not, and the mix of emotions behind her words leaned him towards that option. 

She kept talking after a few seconds. “We found the people that killed Joel. Ellie, and Tommy I guess, did horrible things to some of them, and I could see that she was getting damaged in her body and her mind in ways that I didn’t know if she could ever get better. But I couldn’t blame her. I’ve told you about Talia, my sister. If I had the people that killed her in front of me, I would have done awful things to them. I might still. But I found out I was pregnant, and Ellie and Jesse found a good place for me to hide while they went to find Tommy so we could come back here. 

“Jesse found Tommy, and Ellie kept hunting. She and Tommy killed almost all the people that were responsible for Joel’s death, except the woman who actually swung the club. Then, Ellie killed someone who made her second guess, and she came back to help me come home. And then the woman that had come for Joel came for Ellie. The woman shot Jesse, and she shot Tommy. I was infirm and hiding for most of the fight, or I might have gotten shot, too. 

“I came to help Ellie when she was losing. I caught an arrow for it.” Dina tapped absentmindedly on her right pec. JJ knew there was a scar there. Sometimes it panged, made it hard to do heavy lifting. “We might have died, but the woman let us go. And so we went home. And Ellie and I got together, and got to work raising you. For a while, it was good.” Dina’s face hardened a little. “Then Tommy came to us.”

JJ knit his eyebrows. “Hang on, I thought Tommy got shot?”

Dina blinked a few times. “Oh, right. He wasn’t dead, just crippled. And he had a lead on the woman we’d gone after, but he couldn’t go because he was hurt.” Dina chuckled to herself as she thought how to put the next words. “He guilt tripped Ellie, and Ellie had enough guilt that, if you hooked it up to a generator, we wouldn’t need the dam.” 

JJ had an absent thought that that wasn’t how the law of conservation of energy worked, but dismissed it. 

“So, she went to go seek her revenge. Even though we’d nearly died the first time, even though we had a family.” She looked back up at JJ. “I might have given her the benefit of the doubt, I might have taken her back when she came home, if I hadn’t caught her the night she was leaving. She chose her pain and her rage over loving us, JJ. And love is the most powerful thing, but you need to love yourself first.” Dina took JJ’s hand, trying to make sure he was listening. “Because I love you, and I love me, I can’t forgive her for that. And I know I made the right choice, because she went with Mr. Matthews a few years later to go raging some more.”

JJ took a minute to process, his eyes closed to focus. There was a piece of the story that was sticking in his head. He finally put it into words. “So, Jesse went with you two for her revenge quest, and that’s why he died?” 

“Well, he died because he got shot, but we were out there because Ellie was our friend, yeah.”

JJ nodded to himself, breathing deep and slow to keep calm. “Alright. I need to go to bed. Can I sleep in?”

Dina gave him a small smile and tousled his hair. “Of course, kid. I’ll talk to your teachers in the morning.” 

JJ gave his mom a quick, but tight hug, and went to his bedroom. He put a few things together in there: a dark blue jacket and pair of pants, his soft soled skating shoes, and his pistol, a round chambered and the magazines loaded, and he slept fitfully the rest of the night, thinking and dreaming of revenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahahahahhhaaha! This has secretly been an Everyone is LGBT AU the whole time! JJ? bisexual. Martha's dad? Trans. Jeff? Has a husband. Seth? FUCKING DEAD. That's why Mr. Matthews couldn't find him in chapter 1! Muahahahahaha! 
> 
> Just kidding about the above, in case that's not clear. I just went into this planning for JJ to be straight, but that didn't work out lol. In all seriousness, don't expect the rapidity of posting for the past couple of chapters to maintain for long. I have been on an unusual binge of late. 
> 
> Two more chapters! It gets a bit rougher the next chapter folks, but the last one should be lighter. Don't forget to feed your author! Positive feedback is what keeps me alive. It's like a photosynthesis thing. For those that want a sneak peek into what I have planned for the next chapter, just know this: the song for it is Bottom of the River by Delta Rae. If you really need to know.


	6. Bottom of the River

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ looks for closure in all the wrong places.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter include: discussion of death, depiction of trauma, cursing, threats, graphic imagery.  
> It's also generally heavy. 
> 
> Song for this chapter: Bottom of the River by Delta Rae. Link: https://open.spotify.com/track/2LzyUfJdRp3uqTrITBJXEY?si=HE_X14P7RsC3mJB1DwWbPQ

JJ had trouble sleeping. Someone named Abby shot his dad in the face, according to Ellie, and he was out there to get shot because of her. He wanted to lash out, he wanted to hurt someone or something. As he was undressing for bed though, he set down his jacket with a heavier thump than usual. He remembered the tape player, and pulled it out. 

American Idiot is an odd rock opera, even odder for someone who didn’t get many of the intricacies, references, and figurative language throughout it. He laid in bed listening for the better part of an hour, focusing on trying to decipher the lyrics and music into a cohesive story. Then, he hit a track closer to the end of it. “Wake Me Up When September Ends” taunted him, not filling him with the kind of righteous anger and mild confusion of the rest of the album, but instead a weird melancholy that he didn’t understand at first. 

Then he listened to it again. And again. The fifth time, he thought he understood it better. The singer’s father was dead twenty years, and every time September rolled around, the month that he died, he felt that same urge to crawl away and hide until the end of the month. With this realization came an image. 

On patrol, one of the infected, a runner, took a shotgun blast to the face. One moment, it was screaming and charging them, dangerous and animalistic for sure, but alive. The next, it was on its back, a solid third of its head gone or caved in, sprayed on the ground behind it. JJ tried to put his father’s picture into that image of gore. 

He felt a swell of nausea and ripped the earbuds out of his head, hurling the tape player across the room. There was an immediate pang of guilt. The gravity with which she’d handed the device to him told him that she thought a lot of the gift. Maybe a lot of him. 

JJ shook his head, denying the urge to go check on the walkman and see if it would still work. Instead, he stayed in bed, fuming, trying to will himself to rest. He knew that he’d have no shot of doing what he was steadily realizing he needed to do without resting first. 

If it weren’t for Ellie, then Dina, his grandmother, nobody would have to spend their lives dreading September for Jesse’s memory.

**********

JJ hammered on the door to Chris’s house. His best friend lived in a repurposed bike shop on his own. It’d been eight thirty in the morning when Dina left to talk to JJ’s teachers, and he’d left a few minutes later. School started at 9:15 in the morning, so JJ might not have left yet. JJ silently prayed that he hadn’t. He didn’t know if he could do this alone. 

Chris answered the door a minute later. The smaller boy stood there in his pajamas, rubbing sleep out of one eye with ashy knuckles. “Hey, JJ.” Once his vision cleared up, his eyebrows knit with concern. “What’s going on?” 

Rubbing the circular barrel of the rifle slung over his shoulder, JJ chewed his lower lip. “I need your help. Are you still willing to watch my back?”

Chris looked up at JJ for a solid half minute, gears clicking in his brain, before responding. “Give me a minute. I need to get my shit together.” He stepped back into his house. 

JJ paced for the five minutes it took Chris to step back outside. Chris checked the chamber of his Glock, nodded, and tucked it into the front of his jeans. “Alright, let’s go,” JJ said, starting off at a brisk pace towards Ellie’s house. 

Chris jogged to catch up with him, his shorter legs not helping. “Hang on, hang on. You still haven’t told me what this is about.” 

Again, JJ ran his thumb over the barrel of his father’s rifle. “I need to, I need, I need to deal with Ellie.”

“JJ, if Martha didn’t try to kill her over what she did with her dad-”

“It’s not about Martha,” JJ snapped. He took a breath, even having to put it into words hard enough. “She got my dad killed. My-Dina told me last night.”

“Okay.” Without looking at him, JJ could hear the concern in his friend’s voice. After a moment of continued, furious walking, Chris said, “So, what’s the plan? You heard Martha, she’s dangerous. Aside from that, if we somehow manage to do this without getting hurt, what are we going to do? The rule for murderers is to kick them out of town.”

“I know.” JJ flexed his pained hand. “We’ll claim self defense. I heard Old Lady Oliver talking to Ellie before we went on patrol the other day, asked if she was going to have a freakout when the guns started going off. Plus, when I ran into her at night, she was drunk and high and thought I was a ghost, and the woman she was with might have heard it, might corroborate.”

“You’ve thought this through, then. I don’t suppose there’s any way I can change your mind?”

JJ was barely astute enough at the moment to know there were probably a couple. “No. No, there’s not.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you do this alone.”

JJ nodded, finally letting himself glance at his friend’s face again. “I appreciate it. So, the plan I’ve got for actually doing it is, admittedly, a little dumb. Just knock on her door and shoot. If she doesn’t hurt us before it’s done, then I’ll just smack my head on the doorframe or something.” His eye twitched, a part of his brain screaming against what he was intending to do. He squeezed his hurt hand into a tight fist, the pain blasting out the conflicting thoughts. 

Chris called attention to it though, uncomfortable with the silence. “So, what happened to your hand, JJ?”

JJ’s shoulders sagged as he remembered the events of the previous day. He shook his head. Once this was done, what happened with Martha would be small beans. Shit, she might even thank him for it. He couldn’t talk about it right then, though. Any feelings other than the cold rage in his heart would make this impossible. “I’ll tell you about it later. It’s not bad enough to make me less effective with a rifle at least.”

Nodding, Chris took a moment to let JJ’s feelings settle before saying, “How’d it go with Martha, by the way? I wasn’t actually upset when I left, if you’re wondering. I just thought it’d be a good idea to give you two some alone time.”

JJ knit his own brow. Usually, he had a good idea of what people were trying to do when they talked about things that didn’t make sense in the current context. His mind though, so loud with emotions, couldn’t put two and two together. “It went fine, Chris. Is this really the best time to talk about this?”

“I see your point. Does she know about what you’re doing today?”

JJ shook his head, his eyes on the empty morning street ahead. 

“Maybe we should grab her. She’s always late for class, and I’m sure she’d want to be there to keep you safe if for nothing else.”

“No, Chris. I don’t think she’d be okay with me doing this.” JJ squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, needing a way to express the conflict without giving it an opportunity to take root. 

They rounded the corner to the street down to Ellie’s house. Down at the other end, a couple kids joked with each other while they ran off, presumably to class. Chris said, as they watched them leave the street, “Well, maybe she’d be right. To not be okay with us doing this, I mean.”

JJ stopped and put a hand on Chris’s shoulder. For a moment, Chris was hopeful that it was him looking for support while he came down from whatever upset had him on this stupid path. Then, his grip tightened, and the fury showed on JJ’s face. With his strong features and the intensity of his emotions, he looked a little demonic up close. 

“Go home then, Chris. I’m going to do this. If it wasn’t for her, my grandmother might still be alive. My mom wouldn’t have gotten shot because my dad would have been there to protect her. There’d be one more good man in the world if it wasn’t for her.” He shoved Chris back a step, shaking his head. “So go, if you don’t want to taint your soul or whatever bullshit by killing someone who deserves it.” The tiniest voice contested whether or not Ellie deserved it. The rage drowned it out. 

Chris winced. “JJ, I have killed people. When you left Jeff and me up on that wall, people scaled it. I killed two people, a woman and a boy. He looked like he was our age.” His own anger built up to the surface. “So yeah, forgive me if I don’t want that torment on a guy that I love, forgive me if I want you to change your mind so that you don’t have to deal with what that does to someone, but I’m not a fucking flake. If you don’t change your mind, I’ll try to keep you alive, I’ll take the blame with you.” His anger slipped for something more akin to a determined fear. “I meant it when I said that I’d go with you if you wanted to go over the wall sometime. I’m not losing you.”

For a moment, JJ sagged. For a moment, Chris had thought he’d won his friend’s resignation. Then, that image hit JJ’s head again. That infected man who’d had his head taken half off with a shotgun, what little features remained replaced by his father’s. JJ nodded. “Then let’s get this done.” 

Chris sighed, shaking his head, but followed JJ all the same when he stepped up to Ellie’s house. 

JJ’s fist on the door reverberated through the house. No response for two minutes, so JJ knocked again, harder this time. His patience disappeared at the lack of response, and JJ hammered the door again, more times, hard enough to send shocks up his elbow, shouting, “Ellie! Ellie, get out here!” 

Chris’s own anticipation welled up in his chest, and he’d nearly drawn his pistol when he heard from the next house down a door open. He looked, and the old gunsmith, Mr. Charles, stepped out. “What’re you boys doing?” his elderly voice creaked across the empty street. 

JJ was nearly hyperventilating, so Chris said, “We’re looking for Ellie, the bowyer.”

Mr. Charles blinked for a moment before his eyes widened and his suspicious expression relaxed. “Oh! I didn’t recognize you right away, Mr. Dai. Yeah, Ellie’s out at the graveyard, told me to tell you that if you should come calling.” 

JJ sniffled back his panic as the information processed. “Thanks, Mr. Charles.” His voice came out a little trembling. “Um, I’m sorry for waking you up.” 

“Of course.” He squinted for a moment. “And if I recognize that rifle, bring it by sometime. It’s due for a new spring for the magazine tube, especially if you’ve been keeping it loaded.”

Already starting down the street, JJ said, “You’ve got it.”

“It’s not very far to the graveyard from here,” JJ said. “Let’s get there before we miss her.” 

“What are we going to tell your mom?” 

“I’ll think of something.” 

Chris smelled an odd humidity, and glanced to the horizon. Storm clouds gathered there. Of course, he thought. There couldn’t be a good omen for this, could there?

**********

Ellie sat cross legged on the ground beside Joel’s grave. Weather had damaged the wooden marker a little bit, but it was still easily decipherable. She sipped the coffee in the mug in her good hand. She winced at the taste. “Sixteen years, and I still have no damned clue why you liked this shit so much.” She set the mug beside her and pulled the instrument case onto her lap. After clicking it open, she pulled out the ukelele inside and put a pair of thimbles on her stumps. They gave her fingers just a little extra length, and helped suppress the sensitivity of the ends. 

“So, I wrote this for them on guitar before I left for California. Kind of a prayer that I could make myself stay, I guess. Spud was always into music. I hope he still is. Course, I can’t play it on guitar anymore. I’ve had this thing for a few years though, and I’ve finally made myself learn it properly.” She twiddled the fingers with the thimbles with a sad smile. “These help. Haven’t been able to build up my calluses yet, even if they fuck with the sound a little bit. Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve performed, so I wanted to play this for you as a warm up before I take it to Dina and JJ. Here goes.” 

She started with strums of a few related minor chords. After a moment, she sang along with it. 

“I know we’ll never grow old together,  
‘Cause you’ll never grow old to me.  
You’re the pink in my cheeks and I’m scared that it means  
I’m a little bit soft.”

She put the chords strummed into more of a rhythm as the tune picked up. 

“But don’t beat yourself up, honey.  
It wasn’t just the world that I was hiding from.  
We were messed up kids  
Who taught ourselves how to live  
And I’m still scared that I’m not good enough. 

“I’ve always felt like a monster,  
Long before I was bit.  
Was only seen as a monster,  
Let’s just say I’m used to it.”

JJ’s voice interrupted her. It didn’t sound like the normal even, measured tone he took though. It was quiet, but full of blood and fury. “How did it happen, Ellie?”

**********

JJ watched as Ellie’s voice died. She set down the ukelele beside her and turned, seeing the boy with his rifle leveled at her face. He could have killed her with her back turned, he knew that, but he needed to see her face. He needed her to know who was doing it, why, and he needed to know how it happened. 

Ellie wet her lips with her tongue and kept her body and face still. “What are you referring to?”

“You getting my dad killed. How’d it happen?”

She took a few breaths. “JJ, what are you-”

He cut her off with a snapped, “Shut up. Answer my questions, or I’ll just hurry up to the end.”

She nodded, her hands having slowly risen up beside her head. JJ circled around her. “Well, that’s a story. I’ll tell it as true as I know how.

“Sixteen years ago, I had a father. A woman killed him for a wrong that he did to her.” In her faster breathing, the slight knit of her brow, JJ saw an old, deep pain behind her false calm. “In response, I went to hunt her down, and my uncle did, too. Your mom came with me because we were girlfriends at the time, and your dad came with us because we were friends with him. 

“We tracked her down to Seattle. I killed a lot of people, and some of them were her friends, while I tried to figure out where she was. We found out your mom was pregnant after a day or so, and while Jesse went to find Tommy so we could leave, I kept hunting the murderer. I didn’t find her though.” She looked off to the side for a second, seeing something in her mind’s eye that JJ couldn’t. “So we got ready to leave, when she found us.

“We fought. In the fight, she shot your dad, and he died.”

JJ shook his head. Some nonsensical part of him couldn’t accept that simplicity as enough. “No. No. No, I need details. Dina told me over and over growing up that he died protecting her, and I need the truth now.”

Ellie swallowed, glancing at Chris at JJ’s side. He had his pistol out, but pointed at the ground, not her. “If you’re sure, I’ll tell you the details, but JJ I don’t think that’s going to help you at-”

“What did I fucking say?!” he shouted. He flicked his eyes around the graveyard, finding it still empty but for them. He brought his eyes back down to Ellie, breathing harder. “Tell me how it happened.”

Ellie nodded. “Okay. Okay. So, we were packing up to go. Your mom was sick, so it was just Jesse, my uncle, and me. My uncle went into the foyer of the theatre we were holed up in to find something in his bag and Jesse and I were waiting when we heard shouting. We ran out there, and I barely caught a glimpse of her before she was shooting a pistol at us. Jesse caught a bullet in the head, and that was that.” 

JJ felt his throat swelling with mounting tears. Some part of him still hoped that the real story would match up with what his mom told him. He nodded, squeezing tears out of his eyes. “Okay. Okay. Did you kill her?”

Ellie shook her head slightly. “No. No, I came close, but she beat the shit out of me, and she almost killed my uncle. She was about to slit your mom’s throat,” she paused, looking to Chris, “when a little boy she was with convinced her not to. I just wish he’d stopped her before she hurt your dad.” 

JJ squeezed his eyes shut again. He was going to cry soon, he felt that building up, so he went to play an image of his father dead in his head, but it didn’t appear. Instead, it was one of few pictures he’d ever seen of him, one from his grandmother’s house: Jesse as a teenager, smiling wide and shaking the hand of another boy, with a soccer ball under his arm. His grandmother had told him that the picture was taken after one of the last soccer games in Jackson. Jesse got his ankle twisted by a botched slide tackle from the boy he was shaking hands with, the injury ending up getting contact sports banned for the risk of injury, but Jesse was a, “stand-up guy,” as his grandmother said. Not the type to hold a grudge.

“JJ,” Chris said, “do we need anything else here?”

JJ shook his head and lowered his rifle. Hanging his head, he said to Ellie, “Don’t talk to me.” Still, he hesitated as he turned to leave. After a moment, he said, “I’ll come to you when I’m ready.” Nodding to himself, he turned and, with Chris at his side, left the graveyard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woof! Heavy chapter, folks. Also, I know it's a bit shorter than most of the recent ones, but I think the length works pretty well for it. Last chapter's happier, and maybe a bit longer. Got a couple loose ends to tie up, anyhow. 
> 
> As always, don't forget to feed your author! Feedback is always welcome, though I ask if you have any criticisms that you try not to be mean about it.


	7. Brave/Monster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ talks to Chris for the first time in months. Ellie takes her own advice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The songs for this chapter are: Brave, by Riley Pearce, and Monster by Olivia Olson and Half Shy. Not coincidentally, the song that Ellie played in the previous chapter was a modified version of Monster.
> 
> Links: https://open.spotify.com/track/5gqcOwKXxGTth8CUfN8woT?si=xHXF6_5dSnu0jxggE5MtiA for Brave, and https://open.spotify.com/track/1zlj9U57Xwmh9NXj51obSD?si=8rxSv3GSTL2pNOnB5p0lBQ for Monster. 
> 
> Warning for this chapter include: strong language, romantic troubles, nonexplicit sexual content, and paranoia.

It was noon a couple days into winter break when JJ heard a knock on his door. He took another glance at the letter he’d been writing on the dining table before standing up. Padding over to the door in socks, JJ peeked through the peephole, just a little bit paranoid, before smiling and throwing it open wide. 

“Chris! I was wondering when you were going to show up.” Or if, JJ thought. 

Chris shrugged and glanced at the interior of the house. “Well, you can’t stop the march of tradition. Can I come in?” As if to illustrate his request, a flurry of snow blew into his hair. 

JJ hesitated for a moment. Even after two months of distance to figure out his feelings for Chris, cute moments like snow getting in his hair made him falter. He shook the hesitation out of his head and said, “Yeah, of course, come in.”

“Thanks.” Chris stepped past JJ and JJ closed the door tight, making sure the cold couldn’t get in. He kicked off his boots by the door and hung his coat on the knob in a practiced motion. 

Once Chris’s coat was off, JJ realized he was wearing a slimmer fit turtleneck than he’d realized. That, or he’d gotten a bit more muscled. Hang on, “Chris, have you been bulking up?”

“Oh, right.” Chris shrugged. He was still skinny, but his shoulders and back looked a little more muscular the more JJ looked at him. JJ tried to think of a way to distract from the way he was breathing a little harder at the sight of him, but came up blank for the moment. “I haven’t signed up for my first patrol, and I’m trying to get a bit stronger before I head out.”

Oh, fuck. “Your birthday was a couple weeks ago, right?” JJ’s excitement at seeing his friend faded a bit for disappointment, his face falling. 

“Yeah. Appreciate you giving me space, though.” Chris casually pulled his pistol out of the waistband of his jeans, though pointing it in a safe direction. “Still been a bit paranoid that Ellie’s going to come after me. Don’t usually like to take this thing wherever I go, but I don’t feel safe without it.” He stepped over to the dining room and set it on the table there, glancing at JJ’s writing. “What’ve you been working on?”

JJ hurried over and snatched the notebook off the table before Chris could get a good look at it. “Uh.” As a blush grew over JJ’s cheeks, Chris scoffed. 

“Writing something for me, then? Or is it Martha?”

JJ shrugged and sighed, stepping over to the living room with Chris close behind. He sagged onto the couch. “Both of you, I guess. Gone through a hundred drafts of those letters. Old Lady Oliver’s going to have my damned head for wasting paper soon.”

“Speaking of old ladies, where’s your mom?”

“Oh. She’s running errands. Trying to get some ingredients together for Christmas cooking.”

Chris nodded. He glanced around the room, seeing a poster of a Christmas tree with presents set up under it, fuzzy red stockings over the fireplace, the Menorah in the middle of the coffee table. “I don’t think I ever asked, but why don’t you guys celebrate Hanukkah?”

JJ gave Chris a small smile. “Two reasons. First off, Mom got frustrated with the changing dates when I was little, and decided Christmas and Hanukkah could just be the same day. Second, you started coming over for Christmas every year, and she didn’t want to explain the different holiday.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m here this year. Even if it’s all a little fucked up with us.” He leaned back on the couch, resting his hands on it. JJ was supremely aware of the proximity of Chris’s left hand to his thigh. 

“I’m glad you’re here, too.” They sat in silence for a second. Fuck it, JJ thought. He might not want to be here with me after Christmas, let’s get this out now. “So, there’s some things I wanted to tell you.”

Chris twiddled his thumbs on his lap, nodding and hunching a little bit. JJ recognized in his body language that he was nervous. “Yeah, me too. You can go first if you want.”

JJ didn’t want to have to make that choice, too, so he went with Chris’s suggestion. “Alright. Here goes. Um, I tried writing you a hundred different letters, and I told you that, but, shit. I’ll just say it.” JJ stared into the fireplace, not sure he could actually say what needed to be said with the added pressure of looking at Chris. “I like you. I like having you around, I like giving Alice shit with you, I liked moaning about Martha with you, but I’ve been thinking about a lot of things these couple months, and I miss you. A lot.” 

He watched out of the corner of his eye for Chris’s reaction. Chris nodded at JJ’s words and opened his mouth for a few seconds before responding. “I miss you, too. And, uh, I guess you figured out I’m bi, right?” JJ nodded. Chris drummed his fingers faster and faster on his thigh. “Um, I told you I love you last time I saw you, and I think that was the first time I actually told somebody that. At least, since my parents kicked the bucket.” JJ caught Chris’s voice starting to shake. 

I’m already in this deep, might as well dive further, JJ thought. He grabbed Chris’s hand and gave it a firm squeeze. “Hey. I was going through some shit at the time, but I should have said it then.” He finally found the strength to look Chris in the eye, seeing more fear in his face than he’d seen in a long time. “I love you, too. And I guess I’m bi, or heteroflexible or whatever.”

Chris laughed out loud, the fear disappearing for relief over a couple seconds. “Heteroflexible, huh? You haven’t been watching those movies Martha was teasing me about, right?”

JJ laughed with him, but couldn’t quite commit to it. He still had to tell him about Martha. “No, it’s just a word my mom likes to use. And it’s just fucked up because Martha told me the same thing the day before we, uh. Talked to Ellie. But I think I fucked up that relationship pretty good, and she won’t want anything to do with me anyway, so yeah. I’ll apologize to her sometime soon, but I don’t think we’re kissing again.”

Chris’s next laugh was only mostly honest. “Well, I hope I’m not your second choice or some bullshit.”

“No, no.” He gave Chris’s hand another reassuring squeeze. “No, I think, if I’d figured out why I get hot around you earlier, I would’ve realized you’re better for me than she is.” The sound of the bottle breaking went through JJ’s head again, and he winced. He clutched Chris’s hand tighter as he spoke, his voice growing shaky. “And I’m not just saying that to keep you around, but it’s been hard without you. Without the both of you. I don’t know if it makes sense, but I feel a little bit lost.”

Chris scooted up next to JJ, letting go of his hand to slip a slim arm around his ribs. “I get it. Honestly, I’ve been trying to convince myself to come back here and talk to you again, but I just couldn’t get the nerve I guess. You and Dina have been just about the only people I could rely on for a while.” He looked up to JJ with a smile, and they both blushed, seeming to only then realize their closeness. 

“Uh. I’ve never kissed a boy. Course, I’ve only kissed the one girl, and-”

“Hang on. You and Martha kissed?” Chris asked with a smirk. At JJ’s flustered sputtering, he laughed. “Hard to believe that asshole got to you first.” Nerves returned to his voice and posture a moment later as Chris shook his head. “Well, I can’t imagine it’s that much different from kissing a girl. Do you want to kiss me?”

JJ chewed his lip a moment, trying to slow his heartbeat, his breathing. Be brave, be brave, he told himself. “I want to do a whole more than kiss you.” His voice came out a little lower, more of a growl than his usual tone.

Chris’s jaw dropped for a moment before he picked it up. “Fuck, you’re hot.” He wrapped his arms around JJ’s shoulders and pushed forward to kiss him. 

They kissed each other for a few minutes. It took them a bit to get a feel for each other. There wasn’t nearly as much guilt this time on JJ’s part, just a slight nag in the back of his mind that he suppressed with the help of Chris’s lips and tongue and hands. 

The little grunts, the momentary moans, the gasps when they broke to breathe, the starstruck look in Chris’s eyes at those moments. The insane heat boiling through JJ’s blood while they ran their hands under each others’ shirts. All these things pushed JJ further into Chris’s lips. 

After a couple minutes, their passion got the better of them. They tried to open their mouths at the same time, and their teeth clacked together. Reflexively, they both pulled back, giggling after a moment. “You good?” JJ asked. 

Chris ran his tongue around his mouth. “Yeah, didn’t bust my lip. Do you, uh. D’you want to go to your bedroom? I kinda want to get your shirt off.”

JJ laughed. “I mean, I don’t have tits, but sure.”

Chris scoffed and gave JJ’s abdomen a stroke with the hand that was still under his shirt. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re fucking hot.”

JJ managed a smirk of his own. “You keep saying that.”

“Ha! Have you seen yourself? Good God, dude, if you were a little more confident you could probably fuck basically anyone at the high school.”

JJ shrugged. “I don’t want to fuck just anyone though.”

A hunger flashed in Chris’s eyes. “Alright, let’s go to your room. I swear I’d die if your mom walked in on us.” He stood up and led JJ to his room by the hand. 

JJ turned to Chris after shutting the door and immediately stepped forward to plant his lips on Chris’s. Chris moaned into JJ’s lips, encouraging JJ to keep going. He held Chris close with a hug, but still pushed hard enough that Chris had to step backwards. Chris’s hands ran up JJ’s shirt, holding him close and getting a feel for his firm muscles. 

They took a break just long enough for Chris to climb onto the bed and JJ to climb after him after stowing his pistol on top of his wardrobe. Chris laughed as JJ joined him, saying, “I guess there was a gun in your pocket, too, huh?”

“Yep,” JJ said, pecking a kiss on Chris’s lips. “Not just happy to see you.” 

One of Chris’s hands ventured below JJ’s belt, making him jump. “Nice to see that you are, though. I’d never forgive you if you let me do all this and not tell me you weren’t enjoying yourself.”

JJ arched his back a moment as Chris applied some pressure through his jeans. “Like I could not,” he managed to get out between grunts. He reached around to grope Chris’s ass, but his friend’s touch made him some kind of weak. 

Chris rolled over, partially on top of JJ. “You make sure and let me know if you get uncomfortable or want me to stop. I love you; I don’t want to hurt you in any way.”

JJ shivered at the words of affection alongside Chris’s touch. “I love you, too.”

**********

JJ had to admit that there was a nice dichotomy between lying hot, sweaty, and panting beside Chris while snowflakes clicked against his bedroom window. Chris’s head laid on his shoulder, fingertips tracing patterns across JJ’s shirtless chest. JJ could have fallen asleep there. He wanted to, but part of him still worried that Chris would be gone again. He needed to say something first. 

“I’m glad my first time was with you,” JJ said. He looked over to Chris on his shoulder and gave him a sweet smile. “I don’t just mean because you got me feeling good. I’m glad that it was with someone I love, someone I trust.” He laid his head back down and closed his eyes, letting out a deep sigh. “God, I could die happy right now.”

Chris thumped his sternum with a flick. JJ opened his eyes again and looked back to Chris, who had a mostly playful frustration in the furrow in his brow and the half smile on his lips. “Don’t go saying that shit. It’s too real.”

JJ pulled Chris closer by the arm around his shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Another minute of pleasant silence passed. Then, Chris startled, having a realization. “Hang on. Are we boyfriends, now?”

JJ gave him another smile. “I’m up for that if you are.”

“Well, are we going public, then? I mean, people are going to judge, say things.”

JJ’s expression turned more serious. “Hey. If Dina taught me anything, it’s how to not take people’s bullshit. If you want to go public, I’ll be right there with you, and I’ll knock a fucker’s teeth out if anyone says anything about us being together.”

Chris chuckled. “How do you make violence sound romantic?”

JJ shrugged with a smirk. “Guess it’s the same way you make, ‘fuck, you feel good,’ sound romantic.”

Chris groaned, covering his face in his hands. “Oh my God. If your mom was here, she’d make fun of me until the day I fucking die.”

“No yeah, you’re right. Course, if you could, you’d do the same to me, so I’d say that’s a little fair.”

“If I could?” Chris asked, his tone disbelieving.

JJ tried to put on his most suave grin, but mostly just came off goofy. “Oh, psh. Have you seen me? I’m far too sexy to make fun of. Plus, apparently I’m super tight, so I could just cut off circulation next time.”

Chris rolled his eyes. “If there’s one thing to hate Ellie for, it’s teaching you wordplay.”

Despite JJ’s laugh, he felt himself tense up at the mention of Ellie. There was a beat of awkward silence while they let the words settle between them. JJ sat up, sliding out from under Chris. “I’m going to go wash up. You should at least cover your dick in case my mom gets here.” He stood up and went through his wardrobe, trying to keep his body language casual while he looked for a clean outfit, despite the new tension in the air. 

“Hey, I’m sorry for bringing it up. It was dumb. I just thought that it’d been long enough since then-”

JJ clenched a hand around a balled up tee shirt in his hand. “Chris,” he said, still facing the wardrobe, “I don’t joke about your parents. Please don’t joke about mine.” He finished collecting his outfit and cooled down a little. Before stepping out, he stopped by the bed to give Chris a peck on his concerned cheek. “I love you.”

**********

JJ managed to not cry in the shower, despite the racing thoughts and emotions going through his mind. The confrontation with Ellie still reared its head in his mind, but he dwelled more on the risk that he’d ruined things with Chris, too. He managed to calm down a bit by the time he’d gone through the motions of washing his body and hair, stepping out immediately after he’d finished, despite wanting to hide longer. Even if he’d rather stay in the shower, he couldn’t waste water or electricity. 

Back in his bedroom, JJ breathed a sigh of paranoid relief that Chris hadn’t left him in the showering interim. The other boy lounged in his bed, redressed, fiddling with the knob on the drawer of JJ’s nightstand. “Hey,” JJ said from the doorway. “Do you, um. Want to snuggle some more I guess? I don’t know how this works.”

Chris smiled up at him, calming the anxious beating of JJ’s heart. “Just come snuggle, man.” 

JJ grinned, excited, and joined Chris under the covers. He had gotten most of the way warm again when he said, “Alright. We should probably talk about what to say when-” He was interrupted by the muffled sound of the front door opening downstairs. “That happens.”

Dina’s voice called up the stairs. “JJ! You good?”

He called back, “Yeah, I’m good! I’ll be down in a minute!”

“I guess I could go out your window?” Chris said in a low voice, gesturing towards the window. “I left my shoes and my jacket downstairs though. And my gun.”

Dina’s voice called back up the stairs. “Is Chris up there with you?”

JJ chewed his lip, trying to think how to respond when Chris said to him. “Hey, let’s just be honest. Not like she could smell what we were doing, right?”

There wasn’t much choice anyway. “Yeah, he’s up here.”

“Oh! That’s a pleasant surprise. Hi, Chris!” 

“Hi, Miss Ehrlich,” Chris shouted past JJ. JJ winced as Chris shouted beside his ear. 

JJ arrived at the foot of the stairs first, batting away Chris’s attempts to fix his hair again. Dina turned away from loading groceries into the fridge and gave the two of them a beaming smile while they made their way into the living room. “Hey, Chris. Didn’t know if we’d be seeing you this Christmas.”

Chris gave her a sheepish shrug. “I didn’t know if you would be either. Glad I am, though.” 

Dina gave JJ a knowing wink and JJ resisted the urge to melt into a puddle of embarrassment. “Well, I’m glad you’re here, too. Kathleen gave me a pie, too, by the way. Strawberry rhubarb. You want a slice while it’s still hot?”

Chris grinned wide, but looked to JJ at first, almost for permission. Taken aback, JJ waved him on, and Chris bolted for the kitchen. 

Dina didn’t hesitate to take a seat next to JJ, giving him a teasing smile that JJ immediately buried his head in his hands at. She leaned over to him, and in a low voice, said, “So, you two are fucking, right?”

“Oh my god, mom,” JJ moaned into his hands. He pulled back from his hands and whispered, accusing, “How the Hell did you know?”

The teasing smile on Dina’s face grew wider. “Your legs were quivering. Should probably do some stretches first next time.”

JJ regretted letting Chris into the kitchen to serve himself pie, and so resolved to bring him back into the conversation, raising his voice as he said, “So yeah, mom, Chris and I are boyfriends, now.”

“Ha! Took you long enough!” Dina kept beaming at them while Chris wandered back in, a steaming piece of pie on a plate in his hand and a bashful blush on his cheeks. Chris took a seat next to JJ, shoveling an almost too large piece of pie into his mouth. The humor in Dina’s face lessened to a concerned affection as she kept speaking. “So, Chris. How’ve you been doing? JJ told me what happened the last time you two hung out.” JJ winced, remembering telling his mom everything, the ugly details and everything.

Chris stopped chewing for a moment, looking at JJ. It didn’t take JJ long to figure that this specific eventuality was what Chris was hoping to avoid by taking such a large bite. That, or he just loved the pie that much. JJ spoke for him. “We talked a little bit about that. He was conflicted, but let tradition bring him over. Plus, apparently he thinks I’m hot, so that’s nice.”

Chris laughed through his pie, and Dina laughed with him. JJ never could resist laughing with Chris, and joined them. 

Then a knock on the door stopped them. 

Dina turned and stood, saying, “I’ll get it.” As she started for the door, Chris crossed the room to the dining table and grabbed his pistol, giving JJ a worried look. 

The door opened. “Hey, Dina.” They all recognized the voice as a moment of silence passed between them all. Slowly, quietly, Chris checked the chamber on his pistol. 

JJ stepped up behind his mom as she said, “What are you doing here, Ellie?”

She looked past Dina, giving JJ a meaningful look. “I’m, well. I guess I just got to be brave. I’ve put it off and put it off and put it off. I suppose I thought I should show up before Christmas so that I don’t ruin the holiday for you.”

Seeing better past his mom as she adjusted her posture, JJ saw that there was no holster on Ellie’s hip, no bow strung to her, no arrows. Just her, in a jacket, unsuitable canvas sneakers, with a boxed up ukulele in her hand. 

Dina took a moment to respond. She spoke slowly, deliberately. “Ellie, I’m not going to have you uprooting our lives again. Say what you need to say and go.” 

JJ glanced at Chris, who’d relaxed a little once he realized that Ellie wasn’t there to kill them for threatening her. Looking back out at the woman in the snow, JJ watched as Ellie set down the instrument case on the stoop. “Well,” she said, “It’s more that I need to sing something than say something.” She set to opening it up, putting thimbles on her more sensitive stumps. “I wrote this for you and JJ before I left for California. I guess it was me trying to convince myself to stay. I really wish it’d worked, but I’ve regretted not playing it for you since forever basically.” She picked up the ukulele, leaned against the wall to get it out of the snow, and said, “So here goes.”

“I know we’ll never grow old together,  
‘Cause you’ll never grow old to me.  
You’re the pink in my cheeks and I’m scared that it means  
I’m a little bit soft.”

She put the chords strummed into more of a rhythm as the tune picked up. 

“But don’t beat yourself up, honey.  
It wasn’t just the world that I was hiding from.  
We were messed up kids  
Who taught ourselves how to live  
And I’m still scared that I’m not good enough. 

“I’ve always felt like a monster,  
Long before I was bit.  
Was only seen as a monster,  
Let’s just say I’m used to it.

“And I grew tough, ‘cause love, it only hurt me back,  
But lovin’ you is a good problem to have,  
And I’m used to that,  
But I could get used to this.  
Yeah, I’m used to that,  
But I could get used to this.

“And I know we’ll never grow old together  
‘Cause you’ll never grow old to me.  
You’re the pink in my cheeks  
And I love that it means I’m a little bit soft.  
You’re the pink in my cheeks  
And I love that it means I’m a little bit soft.”

Her voice died out after the last note, the sound of the snow picking up behind her. She dusted the snow off her instrument and stowed it, saying, “I’ll go now. Thanks for indulging me, I guess.” She kept packing up while the three people inside watched, but before she turned to leave, Dina spoke up. 

“Ellie, wait.” Ellie stopped in her tracks, looking to Dina, but not letting herself feel enough hope to express it. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” Dina said, “but I guess it’s the same reason you needed to sing for us. I love you. I think I always will.”

The corner of Ellie’s mouth perked slightly. “I love you, too.” She looked to JJ, nodding as if to make sure he knew she meant both of them. Then, she turned, nodded to herself, and walked off into the snow. 

Dina watched her for a minute before closing out the cold and turning to the two boys in her house. She sniffled, gave them a smile, and said, “So how about that pie?”

A few minutes later, JJ ate the pie slowly, the warmth helping to sooth the lump in his throat. It wouldn’t be on Christmas, but someday, soon, he’d figure out how to be brave enough to talk to Martha and Ellie again. If his day with Chris had taught him anything, it was that it didn’t matter if the words he used were good or not. It would only matter that he meant them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit, y'all. There's a chance I'll put an epilogue on this or do a sequel, but this is the end of this story. Thank you to everyone that's provided feedback for the story thus far. I'd love some more, in comments or kudos, but I'll just be happy knowing that even one person read my story to the end. 
> 
> Some criticism wouldn't go amiss either. I'm a woman that's mostly had relationships with other women, so if this relationship between two men comes off as inauthentic, I'd like to know, especially if you could be specific with your feedback. Also, here's the link to the playlist I listened to while writing this fic on the off chance anyone wants to check it out. It contains more than just the chapter title music lol: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1M8gKkYk9fzX1WKXdCJsKX?si=xYvkzrlATE6PmGHtVkSIfw
> 
> So there. Don't forget to love each other. Stay warm. And, if you'll excuse the reference and my pretentiousness, don't let your sorrow turn to hate.


End file.
